


10-Auto da Fé

by WritestuffLee



Series: The Warrior's Heart, Volume 4, The Long Shadow [10]
Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: AU, Action/Adventure, Aftermath of Torture, M/M, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-03
Updated: 2007-03-03
Packaged: 2017-12-11 14:08:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 42,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/799587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WritestuffLee/pseuds/WritestuffLee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some old business comes home to roost in a painful way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Faith

**Author's Note:**

> SQUICKY FIC. NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART OR WEAK OF STOMACH. NOT KIDDING! Life-like situations and sometimes nasty surprises. You pays yer money and yer takes yer chances. No spoilers. Not much sex.
> 
> Huge thanks to Mrs. Hamill for her wise suggestions and comments on the first part of this story. It would be in much worse shape than it is without her. All errors are still mine.

### [ôˈtō-də-fā, ouˈtō-] _auto_ , act + _da_ , of + _fé_ , faith

“You’ll be careful.” Qui-Gon said, no hint of question in his words as he watched Obi-Wan dressing. “All of you.”

“We’ll be careful,” Obi-Wan affirmed, no hint of either amusement or annoyance in his reply as he tucked his sash in neatly and buckled his belt around it.

There was nothing funny about either this assignment or Qui-Gon’s uncharacteristic display of worry. One, in fact, was no doubt leading to the other and they both knew it. Hence Obi-Wan’s patience. In truth, he felt all of them had good reason to be worried. Any mission that could command the attention of one knight, two masters, and those master’s senior padawans was nothing to take lightly. He didn’t need his own prescience prodding him to know that this wasn’t going to be a good mission, no matter what happened, and Qui-Gon didn’t need to be told, either. Obi-Wan just hoped all of them would come out of it alive; at least one of them was not going to be safe.

Qui-Gon, for his part, was not fooled by Obi-Wan’s calm. His face and manner betrayed nothing, but the bond between them was pinched and sour with disquiet, if not outright fear, and Qui-Gon couldn’t blame him. His young knight had volunteered for this mission, knowing exactly what it involved, after discussing it first with Qui-Gon. Though his impulse as Obi-Wan’s lover had been to say _don’t go_ , as a Jedi he had seen the Council’s logic in requesting him specifically. In the end, as Obi-Wan had surely known he would, Qui-Gon had weighed the dangers with him but said only that he must make up his own mind. He’d never taken a mission quite like this one, knowing exactly what he was getting into, and Qui-Gon found this more nerve-wracking than his going into the unknown. But he was determined to do nothing to add to his lover’s burden and so did not mention his own fears. Instead, he let all the love and pride he felt for this powerful, capable, and exemplary young knight well up in their bond, hoping it would provide the support Qui-Gon wanted to give him.

Obi-Wan looked over at him with a smile, knowing exactly what he was doing. Still barefoot, he walked to the bed where Qui-Gon was perched while watching him dress, stood between his knees and cupped his former master’s face in his hands. “If I am up to this task, My Master,” he said quietly, “it is only because I was trained so well.”

“And if you were trained so well,” Qui-Gon replied, hands spanning his former padawan’s slim waist, “it’s because I had such fine material to work with.” They kissed tenderly and with great affection, tongues tasting each other at leisure, the kiss holding all else in suspension while it lasted.

“You’ll be late,” Qui-Gon murmured when they parted again.

“No, I won’t,” Obi-Wan replied, smiling. Nonetheless, he returned to the last of his dressing, pulling on his socks and then his boots. In another few efficient minutes, he had gathered his cloak and his pack and given Qui-Gon one last, lingering kiss before letting the door slide silently shut behind him. Qui-Gon stood watching it for a moment, arms crossed, as though willing it to open again and return his lover to him. Then he shook himself and went on about gathering his materials for the class he was teaching shortly. Obi-Wan would be back—or he wouldn’t. There was nothing to be done about it except release his anxiety to the Force. That would take some hours on his knees later this evening, and for evenings to come.

 

The team assembled, as agreed, at the Temple’s east docking bay, where their ship—a sleek corvette, heavily armed for its size—awaited them. Bruck and his master were already waiting, the former insouciantly leaning against the corvette’s fuselage and kicking one heel. His master, a Lannik with a merry disposition, stood quietly beside his padawan, uncharacteristically solemn.

“Knight Kenobi.” Andreth greeted him with a more formal bow than Obi-Wan expected. Bruck followed it with an stiff little bow of his own: “Obi-Wan.”

 _“Obi-Wan”?_ he wondered as he returned the greetings with the same level of courtesy. _When was the last time B-boy had called him Obi-Wan?_ They were all nervous and unhappy about this mission and perhaps that accounted for their formality and the uneasy silence that fell between them now. Garen Muln and his master, Clee Rhara, appeared as he was puzzling it over. Garen greeted him with even more of his usual cool politeness with its undertone of disapproval; his master was only neutral at best. It wasn’t just the team dynamics then, though those weren’t the best. It was something else.

Some of it became clear to Obi-Wan during their final briefing once they were outbound. He understood at last that they were distancing themselves emotionally from the role he was playing. None of them liked it any better than Qui-Gon did. Garen, surprisingly, seemed physically repulsed by his choice to play it, which mystified Obi-Wan. Duty was duty, hard, dangerous, distasteful or not. He’d gotten used to Garen’s strait-laced views about Bruck and their relationship, but this was something different that he didn’t quite understand.

When the briefing was through, only Bruck lingered behind, turning his mug idly in his hands, looking as uncomfortable as he had when they’d met at the docking bay. This wasn’t a good way to start a mission.

“Everything all right?” he said, making Bruck start guiltily. What he wanted to say was, _What’s with the “Obi-Wan” thing, B-Boy?_

“No,” Bruck said, and took a deep breath. “It’s not. I don’t like this. I don’t like you volunteering for it.”

“I’m the only one available that makes sense.”

“I know. I still don’t like it. I don’t understand why it has to be done this way. If something happens to you—”

“I don’t think there’s much question of that.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Obi-Wan nodded. He knew what Bruck was afraid of. He knew Garen was afraid of the same thing. _What if you get killed on my watch?_

“B-Boy, whatever happens on this mission, I know that you’ll have done everything you could do.”

Bruck snorted. “It’s not your opinion I’m worried about.”

Obi-Wan ducked his head so Bruck wouldn’t see his smile. _You liar_ , he thought with affection. “Qui knows it too.”

Bruck said nothing.

“You think our trust in you is misplaced?”

“I guess we’ll have to see,” Bruck replied sourly, pushing himself away from the table. He leaned over it, grabbed the back of Obi-Wan’s neck and kissed him hard. “You stupid bastard. Be careful. Don’t let it go too far, if you can help it.”

And Obi-Wan found himself alone in the galley, which is where he spent most of the journey out unless the team was meeting. Upon reflection, Obi-Wan decided it was better this way, that Bruck’s instincts were right. They were gearing themselves up for this mission, each in their own ways, and they all needed some emotional distance from each other.

There were no farewells when the ground team, headed by Bruck, donned their undercover uniforms and debarked. The two padawans were dropped off together at one location, complete with fake transfer orders, and Obi-Wan was left in the middle of nowhere with nothing but his wits and a set of coordinates to find his own way to his assignment’s contact.

 _Here we go_ , he thought, shouldering his pack and trudging into the wild lands to the appointed place, _down the road to hell._

* * *

 

 

Qui-Gon listened with his full attention to Anakin’s account of his day while peripherally noticing they’d been joined by Mace. He breathed carefully through the little spike of fear that prompted and checked the bond, which revealed only Obi-Wan’s new unease but no actual discomfort.

“—and Chiara’s going to meet me in the sand garden tomorrow to try them out!” the boy finished breathlessly, excited as always by the new mechanical gizmo he’d built. His lightsaber was going to be an interesting construction, when the time came. It was good to see he was at last making friends. It had taken the boy longer than it should have, considering his sunny disposition.

“That’s excellent, Anakin. If they work, perhaps you could show them to the Tech Master. I’m sure she’d find them interesting.”

The boy’s eyes lit up like a droid’s. “Really, Master Qui-Gon? That’d be so wizard! I’d better check them over again. Uh, may I be excused, Master?”

Qui-Gon surveyed the boy’s tray, which had somehow been all but licked clean during his report. Having grown up hungry, Anakin never had to be told not to waste food. “Off with you, Ani. Homework first, though.”

“Yes, Master! Master Windu,” Anakin replied, sketching a quick bow and bolting off with his tray.

The two masters watched him go, and Qui-Gon returned to his own meal. “Mace. Not eating?”

“Finished already, thanks. I thought I’d drop by and see how you’re holding up.”

Qui-Gon looked up. “Fine. Do you know something I don’t?”

“No, quite the opposite. I thought your bond—”

“No,” Qui-Gon shook his head. “He’s . . . uneasy, more so than usual on a mission. But that’s all.”

“But you would sense if he were in trouble, or injured.”

“I don’t know, Mace. I assume so. But it’s not like a training bond; we can’t communicate through it. And we’ve had precious little time together to test its limits and capabilities. To some extent, it depends on how well we both shield.”

“I see.” Mace was silent for a few moments, and Qui-Gon took a sip of his water and sopped up the last of his gravy with a bit of bread, waiting for him to divulge what he was really about. “When Obi-Wan returns, I’ll try to get you some time together to test this bond out. It’s—”

“—between Obi-Wan and me. It’s not at the Council’s disposal, whatever it turns out to be.” Qui-Gon got to his feet with his tray and departed. Mace watched him go silently.

 

* * *

 

 

“Soften him up, Muln,” their Isani CO ordered.

The mission was a horror to begin with and the people whose army they’d infiltrated were barbarous, obviously, or they wouldn’t be here. Working with Chun was bad enough, but being under his command was just—wrong. What the hell had the Council been thinking? How could they trust him with two other lives, particularly one of their best new knights? How chummy Chun and Kenobi were said nothing about Chun’s trustworthiness or competence. The whole situation was a nightmare, one Garen never wanted to repeat.

Now it had just gotten worse.

The prisoner knelt in front of them with his hands bound, filthy hair in his eyes, one of them already blackened and a cut on his lip still oozing blood into his beard. He spat at Garen’s feet, his blood spattering Garen’s boots.

“Yes, soften me up, soldier boy. Like you have softened up all the others: children and old men and grandmothers. Godless infidels, all of you. Why are you here? You were not invited!”

For some reason, Garen hadn’t really anticipated this situation, though he’d been briefed thoroughly for the mission. This was exactly what they’d been sent to find, this mistreatment of prisoners in clear contravention of numerous civilized accords and conventions signed by all members of the Republic. He and Chun had seen it everywhere in the prison they’d infiltrated in their undercover guises as new recruits to the Indu branch of the army. They’d had to participate in some of it, to keep their identities intact. Chun, in fact, seemed particularly good at it, to enjoy it, even, which was disgusting but not surprising. Garen had questioned prisoners before but had never found it necessary to do more than spell out the possibilities. So far he’d avoided actually hurting anyone. The Jedi’s reputation preceded them enough that generally imagination did the work for them, and Garen’s size only helped.

That wasn’t going to work this time.

His CO must have seen the sudden panic on his face. “What, you know this one or something, Muln? What’s the problem?”

“No problem, ser,” Garen replied automatically, chagrined to hear his voice cracking like an adolescent. He could feel Chun glaring at him. He took a step forward, felt Chun’s hand close on his shoulder.

“I’ll do it, ser. Muln’s been feeling a bit off today.”

“Not losing your stomach for the job are you, kid?”

“No, ser,” Garen replied, relieved. “Something I ate yesterday. And this fucking heat.”

Their CO paused for a bit, giving Garen the evil eye, then apparently decided he looked pale enough to be telling the truth. The woman nodded. “Carry on, Chun.”

He’d seen Chun at work before and knew somehow that this wasn’t any more brutal than he’d been with the others. It only seemed so this time. Chun grabbed a thick handful of the prisoner’s hair and dragged his head sharply back, pulling him off balance. With his hands bound behind him, he had no way to catch himself and Garen heard the wind go out of him when he hit the ground on top of his bound hands. Expertly, Chun rolled him over until he was on his stomach, put a knee in his back and pulled his head back once more until his back bowed uncomfortably. The man grunted but said nothing.

Chun planted the stun stick they all carried against the base of the prisoner’s spine and pushed, dropping him simultaneously to keep from getting shocked himself. This was only a quick jolt, sending a strong shuddering through the man’s body and pulling an involuntary gasp from him. While his muscles were still twitching, Chun jolted him again, twice more, the last shock eliciting a harsh cry of pain. Garen had no doubt it was real.

“Motherless bastards!” The man’s eyes were leaking tears. The stun stick had hurt, obviously. Garen felt a little sick, as he always did. It was just harder to hide than usual.

Chun grabbed another fistful of black hair and pulled the prisoner nearly upright again. “Oh, that’s nothing, you whiny little piece of shit. You guys are all alike. Bluster and tripe until somebody gives you a bit of your own medicine. You’re out there blowing people up, half of them your own, and can’t take a bit of rough handling. You’ll fold like a fan in another two minutes. Why not just tell me where your other pals are now and save yourself the pain?”

“What makes you think I know anything?” the man snarled.

“Oh, you know something, all right. And we’ll find out what it is.” Chun shoved him and aimed a hard kick into his midsection. He curled up, retching and gasping.

“Ser, is this really necessary?” Garen blurted.

“Shite, Muln—” Bruck swore, and kicked the prisoner again in apparent frustration. This time, it produced a sick moan.

“Go get some air, soldier,” their CO said, exasperation in her tone.

“I’m all—”

“That’s an order.”

“Ser. Yes, ser,” Garen saluted, face flaming, turned smartly on his heel and headed for the prison’s yard.

Unsurprisingly, it was empty of prisoners, only the guards patrolling the ramparts just visible from the ground. Garen found himself a bench and lit one of the smokes that seemed to be ubiquitous among soldiers—another thing Chun seemed to like. It was astonishing, really, how easily he blended in with these people, how much he seemed like them. Garen felt he stuck out like a boil here, though he’d never had this trouble before. It was working with Chun that was doing it. Obsequious little shit. This just wasn’t going right at all. He’d have run this mission much differently than Chun did, sucking up to the CO all the time. The mission itself was bad enough without having to work with somebody who should have been eliminated from the padawan pool early on.

The Isani army had taken over the city jail, where Garen sat now, when they’d “liberated” the city, which was the capitol of this small principality. As their new prisoner had said, no one had invited them in. A well-armed guerrilla insurgency had risen almost overnight in attempts to drive them out. The general population claimed to know none of them, but were undoubtedly sheltering and provisioning them. Prisoners had been taken, and word of their treatment had leaked out to the Senate. Normally, this would be an internal planetary affair, but there were rumors of professional interrogators being shipped in from offworld and prisoners being shipped out for special treatment.

Garen thought Kenobi was insane for volunteering for this mission, though given the result of his pain trails Garen had to admit the man was the logical choice. They’d shipped out together, discussed the mission together, been briefed together, role-played together, gotten into character together, then split up when they’d landed. As planned, Garen and Chun had presented their forged transfers and Kenobi and gone off to get himself captured as one of the insurgents. Somewhere, Chun’s and his own master were monitoring the situation as much as possible. Mostly, they were on their own, with Chun the designated mission leader while they were inside—a situation that made Garen none too happy.

It had taken Kenobi eleven days to get himself captured, or at least for him to show up here at the central holding facility. In the meanwhile, Garen and Chun had gathered plenty of evidence of prisoner abuse, more than enough in Garen’s opinion. If he’d been running this show, they’d have cut and run the moment Kenobi showed up, but Chun was determined to confirm the presence of outside interrogators, even at the cost of Kenobi’s health.

What had startled Garen this afternoon wasn’t just the transformation Kenobi had effected. He’d watched it begin on board ship when Kenobi had blackened his beard and hair and darkened his skin. The transformation he’d seen this afternoon involved more than the facade. Kenobi’s usual pleasant, cultured enunciation was completely gone, replaced by the broad vowels and harsh consonants of another language along with the rage and defiance burning in the one eye that hadn’t swollen shut. Garen was surprised too at how much Kenobi’s injuries affected him. And there was no telling what kind of shape he was in after Chun had worked him over.

The smoke had burned down almost to Garen’s fingers by the time Chun found him in the yard. He flung himself down next to Garen and leaned over and made a show of wiping the toes of his boots off with a rag. “What the fuck’s wrong with you, Muln,” he subvocalized as he leaned over. “Shape up. You’ve got the CO suspicious now. She’ll reassign your ass if she thinks you can’t handle this, and we need to stay together until they move Kenobi.” Bruck sat up again. “Tough little bastard,” he said aloud. “I think they’re going to have to bring somebody in for him. He barely even squeaked.”

“Surprising, considering it was you working him over, Chun,” Garen retorted. “I know how much you like your work.”

“Yeah, I do,” Chun replied, grinning.

“You make me sick,” Garen muttered and walked away.

 

Bruck took a couple of deep calming breaths and forced himself to unclench his fists. _I may kill him before this mission is over, or make sure he becomes collateral damage,_ he thought. The image of “accidentally” shoving Garen into the line of fire without his saber was deeply appealing. Muln was obviously having a very hard time separating Padawan Chun the mission leader from “Corporal Chun,” his persona for this mission.

Corporal Chun did like his work—a lot, in fact. Corporal Chun was a good soldier who thought the insurgents were ungrateful, troublemaking little bastards, and that his army’s invasion of this backward part of the world was right and just. He loved his world, and his own part of it especially, and the people there who were paying him to do this duty. Padawan Chun, however, found even faking torture an odious duty, though he recognized the need to do it. He was just as good at it as Corporal Chun—probably better, in fact—but there was nothing enjoyable about it.

He’d come to terms with that some time ago, thanks to the help of the man he’d just been ordered to kick the shit out of. He’d hurt Ben more than he liked using the stun stick, though it had been dialed as low as possible, but everything else had been a very finely choreographed fake. A quick check along their faint but still useful lover’s bond let him know Ben was okay. Unlike Muln, they both had a clear idea of what their duty involved and knew there was nothing personal in it. Garen seemed to be making everything about this mission personal.

Bruck took another deep breath, realizing it was up to him to make sure all of this stayed on a professional level, whether Muln liked it or not. If there were personal emotions to untangle as a result, they’d deal with it later—in the salles at home, preferably. Right now, the two paramount goals were gathering evidence and keeping Ben as safe as possible. He hoped they weren’t mutually incompatible.

 

* * *

 

_Glad that’s over_ , he thought, as he looked around his new cell. The intake medical exam he’d gotten after Bruck had finished with him had been brutal and reminded him of nothing so much as the examination he’d endured from a slaver some years ago as Qui-Gon’s padawan, right down to the gloved fingers shoved up his ass. He’d been stripped, poked, prodded, thumped, stuck, cavity searched—a deeply humiliating act for someone of the ethnicity he was pretending to be—numbered, and issued a set of flimsy drawstring pants and a thin shirt but no underwear or shoes, then shoved in here after being roughed up a bit more on the way. But only after he’d managed to knee the guy who’d done the rectal exam.

 _Intractable_. They were calling him that already, which was good for purposes of the mission, but bad for his personal prospects.

They’d locked him in a narrow cell, cramped and hot, which was a change from the usual cramped and dank, but no less unpleasant. It was singularly old-fashioned as well, constructed of stone like the rest of the building, and fitted with metal bars rather than a force field. There was no bunk and the cell stank from the rudimentary nature of the sanitary facilities. And there was, of course, no privacy. The light inside was blinding and he knew it was not going to be shut off to allow him to sleep. That was the last thing they wanted him to do.

They’d taken his binders off, which was a relief, but left him no water or food. He eased himself down onto his haunches gingerly in the posture habitually adopted by the people he was impersonating. It pulled his hamstrings in a way it wouldn’t have if he’d been doing it all his life, but the stiff awkwardness could easily be written off as pain from his treatment now. The stun stick had hurt like hell, though it was harmless, dialed to its lowest setting as he knew it was. Bruck had made sure they were quick and not in sensitive spots. But the pain had slowed him down a little and one of the kicks had connected with his kidney more solidly than Bruck intended. Even so, the damage was superficial, which made it easier to play the part of intractable, non-cooperative prisoner.

Wincing, he settled into a more comfortable posture, back against the wall, knees drawn up, and rested his head on his crossed arms. Just as he might have been drifting into sleep, an ear-splitting whine filled the cell, jolting him into alertness again. It went on just long enough to make him tense up. He’d been waiting for something like that and was not surprised by it, but it was no less unpleasant for his suspicion that it was coming. It would probably go on all night, too. Well, there were ways around that. It wouldn’t do to let them wear him down too early.

 

* * *

 

 

Paired with another guard, Bruck made the scheduled tour of the cells before the night’s lockdown. This included a stroll past the interrogation wing, where he and his partner were diverted from their rounds by a man in civilian clothes who flashed ID at them and waved them down the hall to one of the interrogation rooms. Bruck suppressed the grim satisfaction that filled him at finding someone out of uniform. They’d expected it, but it wasn’t a good sign. In this instance, he would rather have been wrong.

The sight of the body made him wish he was.

“Oh, shit,” his partner muttered.

“Yeah,” Bruck agreed. “What the hell—”

“Not your problem, soldiers. Just take it down and move it out to the meat wagon waiting at the loading dock.”

Bruck did as he was told, fetching a stretcher, holding the body still as his partner unlocked the manacles that kept it chained to the top of the wall, the toes barely touching the floor. The rest of the body hadn’t stiffened yet but the legs felt strangely rigid beneath the cloth encasing them. There were bruises on the man’s face and his hands were grossly swollen from the manacles. Blood had trickled down his wrists and crusted on his arms.

Bruck took the body’s full weight when the prisoner was free and laid the man gently on the floor, though it didn’t much matter now. His partner rolled the body onto the stretcher with his foot.

“Hey, easy,” Bruck protested.

“He’s dead, Chun.”

“And death deserves a little respect.”

“It’s just a sand-eater.”

“You know,” Bruck, said in a quiet voice, arranging the limbs into a semblance of dignity and covering the body with the sheet he’d fetched, “I’ve told you I don’t much like that term. Don’t use it around me again. Get your end, there,” he finished, kneeling to hoist the head of the stretcher. “And take some care.”

 

* * *

 

 

He hadn’t slept much in the last day or so. Less than he would have liked, but more than the average prisoner would. The deprivation had continued longer than it should have, by accepted practices. There was a lot that went on here that wasn’t “accepted practice,” from what he’d seen. There hadn’t been any food or water in the interval, either, and that was also a contravention. Deep meditation was a useful skill, but it didn’t substitute for sleep or hydration or nourishment in the long run.

He was meditating when the cell door clanged open and he was rushed by two enormous soldiers who picked him up by the arms, slammed him against the wall and pinned him, then manacled his arms over his head and pulled a black, stifling, tight-fitting cloth bag down over his head. He heard growling and snarling, reached out with the Force and sensed a dim but trained animal intelligence leashed and directed by the ones who held it. The animal shoved its nose into his groin, still growling, making him flinch involuntarily. Laughter followed and the beast nosed him a little harder, snarling now. It was only a command away from a maiming bite, but there was no sense in hurting something that was only obeying its trainers.

He lashed out with a Force-aimed kick and caught the creature’s handler in the elbow with his heel, heard a sharp crack of bone and a human howl accompanied by teeth sinking into his own leg. _Down! Off!_ he pushed into the creature’s mind, and it backed away, confused and whining, but not before it had punctured skin and muscle at his shin. Blood quickly soaked the leg of his loose trousers and trickled down his ankle. Three hard blows fell on the side of his other leg, just above his knee. A couple more of those, he knew, and he’d be crippled, possibly permanently.

His guards were screaming at him, right up in his face through the hood. One ripped it off again and kept screaming at him in one of the local planetary dialects he didn’t know, apparently expecting some sort of an answer he couldn’t give even if he’d been inclined to. He spit at the man and was punched in the face for it. He felt his nose shatter and his mouth fill with blood. The blow blinded him instantly and stunned him enough that he stopped struggling. The hood went down over his head again, leaving him blind and with nowhere to spit out the blood in his mouth.

Then they left him alone.

He swallowed, gagging on his own blood, and tried to concentrate on getting the bleeding stopped. It was hard to do while he was struggling to breathe through the stifling, blood-soaked cloth of the hood, but eventually his mouth stopped filling. The pain was a steady throb through his face and his legs and his arms were numb.

 _Numb,_ he thought dully, barely able to think through the pain in his face. _Shields_ , he thought, checking them frantically. They’d slipped when he’d been stunned and Qui would be feeling this too, and worrying about him. He shored them up and tried to center himself again to meditate, hoping Qui-Gon hadn’t felt too much of the beating. Hoping there wouldn’t be much more to come.

 

Qui-Gon stopped in mid-sentence, one hand flying to pinch the bridge of his nose at the sudden flare of pain. It blinded him momentarily until he could strengthen his own shields, and he knew immediately what it was from his own previous experience. They’d found him, then, and it had begun.

He looked up at his students, who were watching him quizzically, found his place in his lecture notes, and went on. There was nothing else to be done.

 

* * *

 

 

He was shivering, still fighting off shock when they came in again a while later and unshackled him. They brought him to another room with a chair and a table where there was a medic, and they sat him in a chair, binding his arms behind him. The medic looked him over, set his nose, cleaned and stitched—stitched!—the bite wounds, all without anesthetic. No bacta wasted on prisoners, apparently.

“You could die in those shackles,” the medic told him in a heavily accented version of the language he’d learned.

“I could be killed in them, you mean,” Obi-Wan retorted.

“Have it your way,” one of his guards said, holding him down in the chair while two more taped his mouth shut and blindfolded him. With his nose so swollen and mouth taped shut, it was hard to breathe and he did his best to regulate it. Then they hauled him out of the chair and pushed him down across the table, two of them holding him down. A third smacked his head into it, hard, and held it there. Someone else pulled down his already bloodstained trousers.

Even though he knew what was coming it was still deeply unpleasant. The baton was hard and thick and unlubed and it hurt like hell. After they fucked him with it, they took it out and beat him with it.

Afterwards, they tore off the tape, shackled him to the wall again with his pants still around his ankles, pulled the hood over his head without bothering to remove the blindfold. When he asked for water, they laughed and soaked the hood with it. Afterwards, they shocked him with stun sticks until his muscles wouldn’t stop seizing and he couldn’t breathe. Only then did they ask him unanswerable questions.

 _Tough little bastard_ , he heard one of them say later, when he could exhale without screaming. _We’ll have to ship him out._

_Maybe he’s innocent._

_Don’t be stupid. Why would he fight then?_

* * *

 

 

“We need to go _now_ , Muln. He’s not here, I’m telling you. We’re losing time looking for him.” Bruck wasn’t sure how long it had been since they’d lost the signal on Kenobi’s tracking implant. The last he’d checked it had been before going to bed. There’d been nothing when he’d gotten up six hours later. Muln’s receiver had lost it as well. He’d gone off to search while Bruck centered himself and tried to sense Kenobi’s presence in the compound. He’d been able to earlier, especially once they’d started hurting him, but their bond was tenuous at best and his own sense of it had never been strong. It had always manifested as a warm presence that grew more intense with proximity. He knew Kenobi was still alive, but was pretty certain he was nowhere nearby.

“You can’t know where he is. We need to search, first.”

“Look, this isn’t just a bunch of patriotic amateur quiz masters getting their rocks off here. I helped dispose of a body three days ago, and it wasn’t pretty; it was an Agency interrogator’s work if I ever saw it. We’re not getting any signal from Ben’s tracker, and I _know_ he’s not here. I _know_ it, you don’t, and I’m the mission leader.”

“Oh, fuck you and your mission leader crap, Chun. You’re practically collaborating with these people,” Muln hissed. “And fuck your woo-woo bond shit, too. I don’t know what you think you’ve got going with Kenobi, but I don’t believe it can tell you where he is. Even a training bond can’t do that. I’m going on with the search. If he’s not here, then I’ll leave. Not before.”

Seething, Bruck grabbed a handful of Garen’s uniform and slammed him against the stone wall. “You listen to me, dumbshit. We’ll search because I’m not leaving you here alone. But if anything happens to him because you delayed us, I’ll—” _Later, later. Kick his ass later,_ Bruck told himself, making himself back off. They had to stay together and if Muln wasn’t moving until he’d searched the compound, then it would go faster with two. He shoved Muln away and went down another corridor to examine the cells.

Hours passed and they found nothing but more evidence of abuse, which they documented as they went. The search was made more difficult by several factors: the size of the compound, their need for stealth, and the fact that they were both supposed to be on duty and were presumed AWOL. Sneaking out was even harder due to heightened security triggered by their apparent desertion. They managed to whammy their way out the gate and melt into the dark city streets, but they were full of patrols and it took them another three hours to make their way to the rendevous point and set up their pick-up signal, and another five hours before Clee and Andreth could pick them up without being noticed. By the time they were aboard ship in a secure location again, almost a full rotation had gone by. There was no telling where Kenobi’d been taken by now.

 

Andreth leaned against the bulkhead and watched his padawan. This was something far out of his own league, as well, but Bruck had absorbed a great deal from Padawan Kasir in the time they’d spent together, pranks notwithstanding. Even that didn’t seem to be enough. As it was, he didn’t hold out much hope of finding Kenobi still in one piece. Muln’s stubbornness had cost them a good deal of time.

“Shit, I wish Isa were here. She’s a way better cracker than I am,” Bruck muttered, getting up from the systems console in frustration. He’d gotten into the secure military net, thanks to the security chip he’d palmed from a whammied officer on their way out, but getting into the transfer orders was proving to be a problem. The sector was heavily encrypted and Bruck knew he just wasn’t creative or patient enough to do this. _What would Isa do?_ he asked himself, pacing. He’d watched her often enough, cracking her way through the Temple’s systems for fun and profit, leaving no trace of her presence, and she’d been happy to share her knowledge. But she was one of the best, with a frighteningly logical programmer’s mind and an intuitive sense of the hardware that he didn’t have. She’d tracked Garen’s little break-in to her own system in no time at all—

“You’re wasting time, Chun,” Garen growled. Seeing Bruck’s shoulders tighten, Clee started to pull her padawan away from Bruck and into the galley.

Bruck turned on him, a fevered light in his eyes. “Garen, I can’t do this without your help. I’m no cracker. Not like you and Isa. You need to be doing this, not me.”

“Move it, then,” Garen said, standing up from the jumpseat from which he’d been watching.

Without a word of protest, Bruck did. If it meant they’d find Ben faster, he’d kiss Muln’s hairy ass twice a day for the rest of his life.

 

* * *

 

 

It wasn’t bad, not really. Not yet. Not like his pain trials. Not like the nanites or the shock stick that had been shoved up his ass, then. These shocks had been short and sharp, momentarily excruciating. The toothed clips were almost, but not quite, erotic.

It would have been a good lie if he’d known Bruck and Garen were going to find him, but he’d already lost hope of that. He’d been in here too long for that to be the case. They should have extracted him days ago. He wondered what was holding them up.

At least he’d gotten a bit of physical rest on the way out, even if it was in a sensory deprivation chamber. That had actually made the meditation easier, if they’d only known. His old wounds were healing nicely now, though his nose still hurt and was too swollen to breathe through.

Once he’d arrived in this new place, which was somewhere offworld as far as he could tell, his captors had slashed his clothing from him with knives, splayed him out on the wall with non-conductive binders, and fastened the little sawtoothed clips and their trailing wires to his nipples and scrotum, to his foreskin, his fingers and toes. Then they’d put another black, stifling hood over his head and left him there without doing anything for hours, or maybe it was days. He couldn’t tell now. He’d slept and meditated, pushing the discomfort away, hoarding his strength, releasing the fear they intended to break him with.

He could sense that his serene demeanor frustrated his interrogators, though they didn’t show it. Instead, they turned on the juice.

By this time, he’d settled into saying nothing coherent, but allowed himself to react freely to the pain as he channeled it into the Force. That frustrated them more. The shocks went on for some time more, accompanied by questions, until it became clear this prisoner wasn’t going to cooperate, despite the smell of burned flesh in the air. Instead, they put the hood back over his head again and left him hanging.

It was harder to meditate let alone sleep through the pain now, but he managed it somehow out of sheer exhaustion. He knew it would only get worse and he wondered exactly how long he could hold out, if he should even bother. Were Bruck and Garen still searching for him or had they given him up for dead? Would it be worth it to reveal he was a Jedi? He suspected that the moment he did that, they’d kill him. Perhaps it was just better to attempt an escape before he was too weak and injured to do it. He suspected it was already too late for that.

When his new interrogator arrived, he knew he’d missed his chance. She was everything his previous interrogators had not been: icy, detached, business-like. Obi-Wan sensed an aloof coldness about her that spoke of extensive and specialized training. She was also just a little Force sensitive—not enough to make her useful to the Jedi, or probably to even realize herself that she had the ability, but enough to sharpen what she would think of as intuition and gut feelings.

She peeled off his hood, stepped back and looked him up and down appraisingly, in a way designed to make him feel like an object rather than a person. It was singularly unsuccessful, almost laughable, after his previous experiences as a padawan. This time, he’d been chained hand and foot from the ceiling in the middle of the room, and she walked around him slowly, observing, cataloging. His skin prickled as she stopped behind him. After a moment, she stepped up and ran her hands through his hair and beard. It wasn’t a sensual gesture; she was obviously looking for something. It was hard not to react when her fingers slid behind his left ear, over the almost unnoticeable bump there. A moment later, she pressed something to the skin over it and he jerked at the sharp pain. Blood trickled down his neck. She’d found the tracer.

He felt her fingers on his skin, which was still darkened, tracing the Old Danjii characters for serenity and passion between his shoulder blades and Qui-Gon’s monogram nestled above his crack. She moved up behind him and pressed herself against him, her hands coming around him and gliding over his hips and between his thighs as she rubbed herself against him. “These are very sexy,” she murmured in his ear, drawing her nails down his chest, over his raw nipples. “What do they mean?”

He said nothing, gave her no reaction at all, not even a physical one, that she could use, and after a while, she stepped back and completed her circuit around him. They eyed each other, Obi-Wan blinking in the bright lights after being under the hood, both sensing a formidable adversary. He tried pushing into her mind but couldn’t gather the strength or concentration to do it without her knowing.

“You’re not what you’d like us to think you are, are you?” she said, finally.

Something in her tone made him very afraid.

 

Qui-Gon sat in their bed in the deep night, covers around his waist, hugging his knees and shuddering as Obi-Wan’s pain flooded the bond. It had woken him earlier, not long ago, though it felt like hours. At first it had been a slow accumulation of growing aches, spreading and growing sharper by the moment. Now it was constant pain. He was cold, his hands hurt—a sharp throbbing ruled by his pulse—his chest and abdomen ached with each breath from what had clearly been a beating. His face still ached in a pattern radiating out from his nose. Above all, his hands _hurthurthurt_. Qui-Gon found himself cradling his own together, rocking with the pain.

Obi-Wan was trying to shield in the middle of all of it, trying so hard not to pass along what he was feeling., thinking first of his lover and not himself. Qui-Gon’s heart ached for him at the same time love for and pride in this remarkable man filled him. He sent as much comfort as he could back along the bond, but it was like swimming against the tide, the sensation of pain was so strong. Qui-Gon wished he better understood what Obi-Wan had done for him on Naboo, so he could duplicate it now. He thought, impossibly, that he could hear Obi-Wan screaming. Maybe he was, himself.

It was the door chime, another voice calling him. He looked up into Depa’s warm brown eyes, saw concern and pity there.

Without a word, she sat on the bed next to him, put her arm around his waist and held him. He leaned into her small body, shivering, Obi-Wan still screaming in his head. His hands were on fire now, as though they were being dipped in acid. He tried to rub the pain away. He could hear himself making small noises, echoing Obi-Wan’s screams. Terror flooded the bond suddenly and there was no shielding from either it or the sudden agony crushing the bones in his hands. He heard himself cry out.

There were other hands on him now, not just Depa’s. He recognized Ayana’s voice above the cacophony but couldn’t make out her words. She was kneeling beside him, her hands wrapped around his, and there was Isa, no longer Ayana’s shy little padawan but a young woman, kneeling in front of him, stroking his temples with gentle hands. He felt himself eased back onto the bed, every muscle protesting. A cool, slim hand rested on his forehead for a moment. _Sleep_ ; the command pushed hard into his mind, overwhelming his defenses and drowning out the screams that had grown hoarse, leaving oblivion behind, and silence.

 

* * *

 

 

“It’s time, Bruck,” Andreth’s voice drew him out of an exhausted sleep into the near-instant wakefulness that was the norm on missions.

“Ben,” he murmured, the name coming out of him almost as reflex.

“Nothing new,” his master told him. “We’re dropping into lunar orbit shortly. Time to get ready.”

Bruck hauled himself out of his bunk, not feeling at all rested after the marathon session they’d spent with the ship’s computer. In the end, it had been intuition, or a nudge from the Force, or blind, stupid luck that had gotten Muln into the transfers list after nearly another rotation’s worth of fruitless cracking tricks. They’d review it later to figure out exactly what he’d done, but for now the only thing that interested him was getting Kenobi out of the hell-hole he’d been taken to.

If he was still alive.

The station he was being held in was technically outside Republic territory in the Corporate Sector and the Jedi had no jurisdiction here. Neither did the Agency, but they were apparently maintaining a base here. The location meant they’d never be able to prove Agency complicity, but they had plenty of evidence against the Isani government. This would only clinch it.

Bruck just hoped the cost wouldn’t be Ben’s life.

 

Muln got them into the base, too. Bruck had sent him off to reconnoiter, not feeling fresh enough himself to do it and one thing Muln was good for was observation. He had a sharp eye for weak spots and returned, as Bruck hoped he would, with a plan for getting them inside. He had, in fact, already secured the uniforms to do it in, by ambushing a couple of the station’s guards, trussing them in monofilament, and locking them up securely in an out-of-the-way storage shed. The uniforms weren’t the best fit, but they’d do. Or as Clee said, “they’ll pass in the dark with a push and a mind whammy.”

Getting in and getting Kenobi out turned out to be the easy part. They sauntered through the checkpoints with their badly fitting uniforms and fake IDs and generous Force suggestions that nothing was out of the ordinary and they were just a couple of regulars on leave returning to base. Bruck accessed the prisoner locations when they were well inside the installation by “suggesting” to one of the guards that it was information he needed. Kenobi’s cell turned out to not even be in the maximum security wing. Once they were inside, it was clear why.

Kenobi was a naked, whimpering ball in a back corner of the cell, curled up around himself with his arms tucked against his chest. It wasn’t hard to see the bruises and blood and charred skin in the bright light flooding the room. Chun swore feelingly if quietly and knelt beside him. Garen stood near the door, covering it as though they really were here for a prisoner transfer and not a breakout.

“Ben, it’s Bruck,” Chun murmured. “We’re going to get you out of here. Just take it easy. I’m going to get this around—Little Gods—what—what’d they do to your hands? Oh fuck. Fuck. Fuck! Fuck them, fucking bastards,” Chun railed in an incongruously quiet voice, all the while wrapping Kenobi up in a thermal sheet. The movement, despite Chun’s care, made Kenobi cry out and thrash weakly. Chun fumbled in his belt pouch for a sedative patch and smoothed it over the big vein in Kenobi’s neck. After a moment, the whimpering and movement stopped.

“You take him. I’ll cover our asses,” Chun barked. “We have to get him out of here. Now.”

Clearly, manual labor and guarding was all Garen was good for on this mission in Chun’s mind, but he recognized this was no place to argue. He slung Kenobi over his shoulder as gently as he could and headed down the hall, one hand on his blaster.

Thanks to their uniforms, no one challenged them until they reached the main gate in the transport truck. Garen drove, Chun riding shotgun, with Kenobi bundled in the back, loosely bound in the thermal sheet and currently unconscious, though he drifted in and out.

“Prisoner transfer,” Chun told the guard who stopped them.

“We didn’t get any notification,”

“You don’t need any notification,” Garen said quietly, pushing the Force suggestion into his mind. He watched with smug satisfaction as the guard’s eyes glazed over slightly.

“I don’t need any notification,” he murmured.

“We’re good to go.”

“You’re good to go.” The guard waved them through, giving the _clear_ sign to the guard at the barrier. The field shimmered off and Muln drove them through. Chun was tense as a wire beside him, clearly expecting trouble even as they put distance between themselves and the base. Frankly, he did too; it had been too easy. “We’re out, Andreth,” Chun told his com several klicks down the road. “ETA about 20 minutes. Have the med droid standing by.”

“Acknowledged. Good job, you two,” Master Rallin’s voice came back tinny but pleased. “We’re ready to lift as soon as you’re aboard. How is Knight Kenobi?”

“Shocky and not doing well. He’s—shit, we’ve got heat, Master. Later.”

“I see them,” Garen said, and swerved the transport, pushing the accelerator hard just as a blaster shot that would have struck them whizzed by.

Bruck’s lightsaber seemed to materialize out of nowhere and Garen wondered briefly where he’d been hiding it.

“No sabers,” Garen reminded him. “We’re in Corporate Sector territory.”

“Fuck that,” Bruck snapped. “So’s the Agency and this is their fault. Let them deal with the diplomacy.”

In seconds, there was a hole in the roof of the cab and Bruck was standing on the seat, picking off their pursuers with their own blaster fire from an angle they didn’t expect. Two were down before they knew what hit them. One gunned his speederbike up beside Garen’s window and found himself facing a blaster aimed over Garen’s elbow while he drove with the other hand; his pursuer abruptly let his speed drop. A second later, Bruck picked him off too. That bought them a little breathing time.

“Corporate Sector security,” Garen observed as he flipped on their finder, “not Agency.” He took a sudden sharp turn down an alleyway, nearly throwing Bruck, who cursed but managed to hang on as they careened through several tiny streets barely wide enough for their transport to squeeze through. Bruck remained standing on the seat, scanning for pursuers. It wasn’t long before another group found them.

“Hang on!” Garen shouted, juicing it as two vehicles started to block the entrance to the alleyway up ahead. They shot forward, glancing off one speeder and flipping another around entirely. The only reason their own stayed upright was Garen’s skill. What all the maneuvers were doing to Kenobi in the back didn’t bear thinking about, though they’d secured him as much as possible.

“Nice job, Muln,” Chun panted.

Garen shot him a look, not sure if he was being sarcastic or not, decided he was sincere. “Thanks,” he replied with a brief smile. No time to get cocky. They were still being pursued and nowhere near home free yet.

Moments later, another group on speederbikes swung in behind them, firing on them occasionally but mostly just hanging back and following. “They can guess where we’re heading by now. They’re going to head us off at the port, try and block us in,” Garen said.

“Yeah. Can you blast us through?”

“We’ll have to wait and see. We’ve only got light arms and this transport isn’t heavily armored enough to go through a blast door.”

The rest of the short trip passed in silence. Fortunately, when the port entrance hove into sight, there was no blast door blocking their way, merely vehicles and the plasteel gates.

“Can you flip the speeder on the left out of the way?”

Bruck wasn’t sure he could. “‘Do or do not,’ as Master Yoda says.”

“Right,” Garen said, heading straight for the speeder on the right. “Flip the one on the left and get down low as you can when I say so.”

“Got it.”

Bruck focused all his will on the left-hand speeder, which began to rock but showed no signs of flipping over and out of their way.

“Move it, Chun!” Garen bellowed.

“You’re heading for the wrong one!”

“You do the flipping, I’ll do the driving!”

 _Oh man, I’ve never been good at this. Do, or—_ Bruck reached out with both hands in front of him, as though picking up the speeder’s front end from fifteen meters away, and heaved, grunting. The vehicle pinwheeled away and at the last impossible moment, Muln swerved them into the gap it created while several shoulder-fired ion cannon blasts obliterated the right-hand vehicle and blew a jagged hole in the plasteel gate beyond it.

“Down!” Muln roared, heading straight for the hole. Bruck was pretty sure they weren’t going to fit. Garen was too.

They screamed through the hole, the remaining plasteel of the gate shearing off the top of the transport’s cab from the windshield up, as well as the top of the cargo box, peeling it like the top of a can and jerking the transport to a spinning stop just inside. Within seconds, Muln was out of the front and slinging Kenobi over his shoulder once again. Bruck, still a little stunned and wobbly from the impact, followed a few seconds later. More Corporate Sector security boiled through the hole after them.

“Go!” Bruck yelled, igniting his saber and charging the squadron, who backed up momentarily in surprise.

It gave Muln a head start with his burden—not much of one, but enough to count, Bruck hoped. In a moment, he was in among their pursuers, lightsaber like a scythe, too close for them to shoot without catching each other in the crossfire, which was just what he’d intended. _Poor bastards never really had a chance,_ he thought with regret.

Then reinforcements arrived, pushing through the gates that were now rolling back. Bruck turned and ran.

In a few moments, he’d caught up to Garen and Kenobi. With the layout of the port and its hangars, it wasn’t possible to put on any Force speed except in short bursts, but it put them enough in the lead that Bruck could at least watch their back now. Their own hangar wasn’t too far inside the perimeter and they managed to find it before security could cut them off again. Their ship was sitting on the landing apron with the ramp down, hot and ready to lift. Garen Force-sprinted the last hundred meters, and charged into the ship.

Chun backed up the ramp behind them, saber deflecting blaster shots in a blur of yellow until the ramp rose under his feet. He ducked and slid like a surfer down the last couple of meters into the ship, rebounded off a bulkhead with a harsh grunt, and flung himself into a jumpseat even as Garen headed for the medbay.

Kenobi was hyperventilating and writhing weakly in pain by the time Garen put him on the pallet. He had just enough time to do that, pull the safety netting over him and grab a handhold himself as the ship shuddered beneath him in liftoff. He held on for dear life as they did a flatly illegal and nearly vertical five-g climb out of the atmosphere while executing evasive maneuvers and taking a few shuddering hits on their reinforced shields. That had to be his master at the controls, he thought with grim pleasure. Nobody handled a ship the way Clee did.

Unaffected by the ship’s wildly shifting orientation, the med droid went about its business. Garen watched in horror as it lifted one of Kenobi’s arms. He understood now why Bruck had been cursing. The sight made him far queasier than the rough ride did. From wrist to fingertips, Kenobi’s hand was nothing but a raw piece of meat. The skin was gone, his hand literally degloved, nailbeds bare and oozing, the whole of it crushed as well as flayed. The other, he saw, was equally mangled. The rest of him was a mass of bruises and burns, his nose broken, eyes swollen nearly shut. He was barely conscious, still breathing raggedly and moaning.

The jump alarm went off and Garen dove for a seat to strap himself into. Moments later, they were in hyperspace, safe on their way to Coruscant. Boot heels immediately sounded on the deckplates in a quick tattoo as Chun appeared in the medbay. Ignoring Garen, he went straight for Kenobi’s side, just managing to stay out of the droid’s way. Bruck’s master appeared a few moments later. Garen, unable to bear it any longer, unstrapped himself and went forward to the cockpit.

As he suspected, the co-pilot’s seat was empty and his master was at the controls. Garen threw himself into the empty chair and sank his head into his hands.

“Gods I’m glad that’s over,” he muttered.

“How’s Kenobi?” Clee asked.

“Not good.” He described the injuries, still feeling queasy at the memory. His master closed her eyes for a moment, shaking her head. “I think we got him out just in time,” Garen finished.

“It sounds like it. At least we have incontrovertible evidence.”

“If the shock doesn’t kill him first.”

“Unlikely, at this point,” Clee replied. “And we have testimony from you and Padawan Chun.”

“Two spies who participated in the atrocities. Kenobi’s more credible.”

Master Rhara reached across and gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Don’t devalue what you’ve done, Garen. You did well.”

“Thank you, Master,” Garen murmured, though he couldn’t shake the feeling that something had gone wrong, somehow.

 

Andreth gently maneuvered his padawan away from the sickbay pallet to get him out of the droid’s path. Bruck hissed and shied from his touch, and that was the first either of them noticed he’d been injured. Bruck was amazed he hadn’t felt anything before this. There was a hole burned in his ill fitting clothing and the blaster bolt had gone right through his upper arm. The moment he recognized that, the wound started to hurt. That almost made him laugh. It also made him a little shaky with delayed shock. Andreth steered him to a seat and eased him into it, then set about examining the wound.

“It doesn’t appear to have hit the bone,” he noted after cutting away the sleeve, “or a significant blood vessel. How much pain are you in, Padawan?”

“A bit. It’s not bad. I can still move it.” In truth, it had started to throb nauseatingly, but he suspected that was due more to adrenalin metabolites than pain and he barely paid attention while his master cleaned and packed the wound with bacta then bound it up and immobilized his arm. His gaze was fixed instead on Ben, the bruises covering him, the suppurating burns in horrible places, the other injuries. The droid had put him out and intubated him, and Bruck found that limp, immobile helplessness all the more frightening for the mass of injuries. Quickly and efficiently, the droid cleaned and sealed and sprayed and wrapped until there was very little of Ben’s skin showing anywhere, including his face. What did show was livid with bruises. His hands were simply undifferentiated lumps of bacta bandage at the ends of his arms.

“He shouldn’t have been hurt this bad,” Bruck muttered through gritted teeth. “If we’d gotten him out earlier—”

“And what have you learned from that, Padawan?” Bruck’s master asked in a mild tone.

“Never to work with Garen Muln again,” Bruck snorted.

“Hmmpf, you already knew that,” Rallin retorted. “That’s not new.”

Bruck thought about the way the mission had gone, about the choices he’d made. “I don’t know. I could have left Muln, instead of trying to keep the team together. I knew he was wrong. It felt just as wrong to split up, though.”

“Do you think that was a good decision in retrospect?”

“I wouldn’t have sliced that code in time. It probably would have been harder to get Ben out alone too. I’d have been less conspicuous, but it would have been tougher to manage the pursuit, too, and I think that was almost inevitable.”

“I agree,” Rallin said, “given how quickly it materialized. So?”

“I don’t know that I could have done anything differently, given the circumstances. If I’d left Garen behind, he might have been captured, I might have failed to get Ben out, and I might be dead or captured, too. Keeping the team together seems the only logical decision. If only Garen would have cooperated.”

“Agreed. But you’re not responsible for Padawan Muln’s decisions or actions.”

“But I was—”

“Mission leader, yes. A leader of equals. You can only lead those who accept your authority. Padawan Muln didn’t, though that was part of his assignment.” Rallin patted his leg. “Despite that, you gathered a great deal of evidence and got all your teammates out safely. You did very well, Bruck.”

“Thanks, Master,” he murmured, thinking, _I’d still feel a lot better about this mission if Ben were in better shape_.

Rallin held out a hand with a pill in it. “Take this and go get some rest. You deserve it. I’ll keep an eye on Obi-Wan for you.”

The adrenalin had flushed out of his system and Bruck felt every bit as tired and ill as he should have. The wound was still throbbing, though slightly less for the local anesthetic. “I will. I just want to get some food first.”

“I’ll bring some in to you. Go lie down.”

Bruck smiled. “Thanks, Master. It’s not very often I get pampered by you.”

“Don’t get too used to it,” the Lannik threw over his shoulder as he headed for the galley.

“With you?” Bruck riposted with a weary grin. “Not likely.”

 

* * *

 

 

Qui-Gon met them at the landing pad, of course. They’d gotten med-evac landing clearance and there was no way Obi-Wan’s former master and long-time lover was going to miss meeting them.

Bruck came down the ramp first, arm in a sling, and went straight for Qui-Gon. Garen slunk past unnoticed as the healers made their way up the ramp and into the ship. Bruck wanted to plant a boot up his ass but refrained more for the sake of his own dignity than any true regard for Garen’s rectum.

“He’s going to be okay, Qui-Gon,” were the first words out of Bruck’s mouth. “But I suppose you know it wasn’t good. You look like bantha droppings yourself.” The older master was grey and gaunt and hollow-eyed, shoulders hunched as though he were in pain himself. Bruck thought he probably was.

“How bad is it?” he said hoarsely. “What have they done to his hands?”

“His hands.” Bruck repeated, wondering where to start. “His hands are—”

But Qui-Gon wasn’t listening suddenly. He was striding over to Obi-Wan’s side instead, walking beside the pallet being guided down the ramp by the healers. Bruck followed. Seeing them together, Bruck wasn’t sure which one of them looked worse. Qui-Gon drew aside the thermal sheet even as they were moving away, a look of horror coalescing on his face. For a moment, Bruck wasn’t sure what he would do. He looked as though he wanted to repeat the injuries on the perpetrators, and then that passed, replaced by anguish. Bruck took his arm gently and steered him to the Healers Halls, both of them silent, Qui-Gon walking alarmingly like an old man.

The ship’s droid had done a thorough job, but it was still limited in its resources. What remained to be done, the healers told them, was the work on Kenobi’s hands, which would involve implanting bone matrices where necessary and fusing everything that wasn’t too badly broken. Bruck hoped the joints and knuckles weren’t irreparably damaged. That would leave Ben facing multiple surgeries, therapy, and possible permanent crippling.

Qui-Gon, who was no doubt brooding about the same thing while Bruck’s injury was being re-examined, stood a little straighter to meet the healer who joined them eventually.

“I’m Healer Valerin. Master Jinn, Knight Chun, is it?”

“Padawan,” Bruck corrected. Valerin nodded.

“Knight Kenobi, you’ll be glad to know, will be fine, though it’s early to say much about his hands yet. He’ll be in the bacta overnight, so I would suggest some rest for you, Master Jinn. And I would suggest you take the sedatives I gave you as well. There’s no reason not to, now.”

Uncharacteristically, Qui-Gon not only didn’t argue, but actually agreed. And for the first time, the pain on his face seemed to ease. He asked a few questions about Obi-Wan’s injuries, thanked the healers and Bruck, bowed, and left. Bruck stared after him in astonishment. He’d never known Qui-Gon to leave Obi-Wan unattended in the Halls.

“He could feel it, you see,” Valerin said quietly, when Bruck turned a puzzled look in his direction. “Through their bond. And he wouldn’t take any sedatives. I’m sure he’s exhausted by now. It’s a wonder he can stand up.”

“I see,” Bruck replied, his disgust with Garen returning full-force. He stayed on until Obi-Wan was suspended limply in the bacta tank, various lines snaking from him. By that time, he had decided he had a few things to say to Garen Muln.

 

Ayana intercepted Qui-Gon just outside the Halls. Obviously, she’d been lying in wait for him, but he was too exhausted to waste the effort to chide her. And if he were honest with himself, he had to admit he was grateful for her company. She’d been with him almost continuously since that awful night, lending both physical and emotional support. He’d continued to experience Obi-Wan’s pain until Bruck and Garen had retrieved him from his cell and drugged him senseless; Ayana and Isa had done their best to help him manage it, but it had been almost a ten of difficult days and nights. Qui-Gon doubted he would have been able to cope with it on his own. Now, without slowing, she slid her arm through his and continued down the corridor with him, matching his long if tired stride.

“You look better already, Master. How’s Obi-Wan?”

“Unconscious, in the bacta, as expected,” Qui-Gon growled. “Though they’re decanting him in the morning, in fact. The wounds are mostly superficial, thankfully, aside from the crushed bones in his hands, some of which have been ground nearly to powder,” he finished in acid tones.

Ayana winced. “That explains the look of rabid fury in your eye. And it seems rather extreme tactics for your average interrogators.”

“Oh, I think there was nothing average about this lot. The previous reports suspected that at least some of them were Agency employees, and I don’t doubt it now.”

“No, it wouldn’t exactly be surprising, would it, with the new free rein they’ve been given by Chancellor Palpatine.”

Qui-Gon said nothing. The fear that had been gnawing at him since he’d woken to Obi-Wan’s pain was gone now, and the anger was fading with it. In its place was mere exhaustion, brought on by days of shared suffering, and disgust that anyone would sanction any acts that caused suffering of that magnitude—or even think it necessary or useful. He stumbled a little and Ayana caught him without seeming to, steering him into the lift, down the next corridor, and into his own quarters, where she divested him of robe and boots.

“Food and then sleep,” she said, directing him into his favorite chair. He didn’t bother arguing.

Later, he remembered consuming something hot and sustaining, but couldn’t say what it was. In the morning, after the first deep and restful sleep he had had in days, he woke to find his clothing on the bench at the foot of his bed, folded more neatly than he could possibly have done himself at the time.

 _Lucky old man_ , he thought, _to have two such devoted padawans._

And indeed, Ayana was just setting out breakfast for him when he emerged from the bedroom. For the first time in too long, he found he had the appetite for it.

They ate in congenial silence born of a long friendship, falling back briefly into their first roles of master and padawan as Ayana cleared up and prepared to follow him out the door.

“Thank you for being here, Ayana,” he said, taking his boots from her. “Thank you for watching over your foolish old master.”

The younger woman snorted. “Old, indeed,” she teased. “ And you’re a fool for that young knight of yours, certainly. You love him quite desperately, don’t you?”

“I suppose that’s rather obvious even to strangers, let alone my first padawan,” Qui-Gon admitted, smiling.

Ayana leaned up and pecked his cheek. “I’m glad, Qui-Gon. He’s good for you. I’m glad he’s going to be all right, too. But you’ve got to do something about your shielding. Whatever this bond is, it could do you more harm than good in the future.”

“A point I cannot argue. I’ll take your recommendation to talk to Saesee at the first opportunity.”

“Very good. Now be off with you. I know you’re frothing to go see Obi-Wan.”

“I am not ‘frothing,’ Padawan. Third Degree Masters do not ‘froth.’”

Ayana, who was nearly a Second Degree Master herself, just rolled her eyes and shooed him out the door ahead of her.

 

Watching Obi-Wan come out of a bacta tank was always one of the most difficult tasks for Qui-Gon, one he found himself doing far too frequently. The generally short time between when he was cleaned up and re-examined and reassessed and when Qui-Gon was allowed to touch him always seemed to stretch into nauseating hours, no matter how short it was in reality. For some reason, only the feel of Obi-Wan’s skin beneath his fingertips could reassure him everything would be well.

This time, that wasn’t necessarily so.

The healers conferred for some time behind his back while Qui-Gon made his own inspection. In the tank, Obi-Wan’s skin had faded to its natural color once again and the black was rapidly growing out of his hair, so at least he looked more like himself. Most of the external injuries were now covered in new, smooth, pink skin, though the hollows around his eyes were still bruised and his nose still swollen. Unlike Qui-Gon’s, it had been carefully reset so eventually there would be no evidence of the break. There was still some light bruising over his ribs, but generally he seemed to be healing well—except for his hands. Though the layers of dermis that had been peeled away were largely grown back along with the nails, it would apparently be some time before anyone could be certain the bones were healing correctly. Inevitably, this brought to Qui-Gon’s mind the memory of his sister’s twisted fingers curled around her cane. Seeing Obi-Wan crippled that way would be intolerable, especially if it could have been prevented.

 

* * *

 

 

Ben was already out of the bacta and propped up a little in bed, sleeping, when Bruck returned to the healers halls. Kenobi looked pale yet, but his color was better than it had been, Bruck thought. His arms lay propped on pillows outside the covers, the hands looking like mechanical constructs on the ends of them, pierced with bracing pins connected to an exterior frame that supported the growing bone matrix inside. Qui-Gon sat in a chair beside him, reading through a data pad with a thunderous frown on his face and tapping his nose with the stylus. He looked up and smiled a welcome when Bruck stepped through the door.

“How is he?” Bruck said in a voice just above a whisper.

“The healers aren’t sure about his hands yet, and it will be some days before they know anything for certain,” Qui-Gon replied equally quietly. “Everything else was comparatively minor: burns and cuts, a cracked rib, and some internal and external bruising. The shocks left him a bit twitchy, but that should wear off shortly, according to the healers. In the meanwhile, they’re keeping him sedated for the pain. He’s high as a senator’s bar bill and quite happy, at present. And Bruck—thank you.”

“For what?” Bruck was genuinely surprised.

“For minimizing the damage. Others were killed in there, according to your reports.”

Before he could reply, Ben woke. “Hey,” he rasped, and then coughed a little. Kenobi’s voice was slurred with painkillers, but he was smiling sleepily when Bruck turned around. He leaned over and kissed Ben’s forehead.

“Doing okay?”

Kenobi nodded and blinked with the exaggerated movements of the massively drugged. “‘M fine. Whatever zis, itsa nize high. Better’n th’ blue thingies at th’ club.”

Bruck laughed and sat gingerly on the edge of the bed. He wanted to hold one of Ben’s hands but they were not only prickly with splints and pins, but colorfully bruised where the metal entered his flesh and shiny pink with new skin. He put a hand just above Ben’s knee and squeezed it a little instead. “Ben, I’m s—”

“Shhhhhhuddup. Y’din hurt me. We played rougher’n that. Jes a few bruises.”

“—about your hands.”

“Han’s?” Kenobi looked comically puzzled. “ Y’din’ do this.”

Bruck sighed. “Maybe I should come back when you’re not so dopey—though that would require you growing a brain at some point. I meant I’m sorry I didn’t get to you in time. Before this happened.”

“S’all right, B-Boy. Knew th’ risks when I took th’ job. So’d you.”

“Was that, ‘so did you’ or ‘sod you’?”

“Yer choice.” Ben grinned goofily. Bruck couldn’t help but laugh.

“Wow. You are really flying, aren’t you?”

“Yep!” Kenobi crowed. “Tol’ you they were good.”

Bruck ruffled his hair affectionately and stood up. “Go back to sleep, you moron. You won’t even remember I’ve been here, the state you’re in. I’ll come back later.”

Qui-Gon followed him out to the hall. “I meant what I said, Bruck. He’s in much better shape than I expected him to be, even with his hands like this. If you and Garen hadn’t gotten him out as quickly as you did—”

“Yeah, I shudder to think. I just wish we hadn’t lost so much time. . . .” he trailed off, lips pressed together, frown creasing his forehead.

“I read the reports. It doesn’t speak well of Garen. But it does of you. I hope you know how well you did.”

“Thanks, Qui-Gon. Coming from you, that really means something. Let’s hope the Council agrees.”

“When are you meeting with them?”

“Garen and I are due there in a couple of hours. Our masters are there now.”

Qui-Gon squeezed his shoulder. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about, Bruck.”

Bruck was less sanguine about that himself. And what he was about to do wouldn’t help.

 

“Hey, Muln.”

It was Chun’s voice, harsh and full of the same coldness he had heard during the interrogations they’d participated in. Garen let the weights down carefully and sat up as Chun approached and stopped at the foot of the bench. His arm was still immobilized, but like Garen, he’d gotten himself cleaned up, eaten, and rested in the day’s rotation since they’d been back. They were due to see the Council in a few hours to give their own reports after their masters. Garen said nothing and the room, full of senior padawans and masters and knights working out as he was, fell into the same silence around them, so Bruck’s voice filled it easily.

“Just a warning,” he went on in a perfectly normal tone of voice. “If Kenobi ends up crippled from this mission, I’ll return the favor the next time you set foot in the same salle with me. And I don’t care what it costs me. Clear?”

Chun stood waiting until Garen realized he actually expected an answer. He couldn’t believe Chun had the nerve to do this in such a public place. “Perfectly,” he snapped.

Chun strode away as though he owned the place, not like the outcast he had been all these years. It was only then that Garen felt the weight of the watching eyes in the room on him, not on Chun as he walked away.

Slowly, others resumed their activities around him and normal noises filled the room again, though Garen didn’t really hear them. He considered going back to his routine but decided he might as well get ready for their council appearance. He got up and went to the showers to wash and dress, finding the tabards and sash strangely awkward under his fingers.

 

* * *

 

 

“Thank you both for your reports,” Windu said finally.

They’d met their masters coming out of the Council room, both of them uncharacteristically expressionless. It was unusual enough that masters and padawans were reporting separately, but meeting that sabaac-face on Andreth afterwards had been enough to give Bruck the chills going in.

Despite his sense of foreboding, it had gone moderately well, he thought. At least until now.

“Wait outside please, Padawan Chun. We’d like to speak to Padawan Muln.”

“Yes, Master Windu. Thank you, Masters,” Bruck murmured. He bowed and walked out of the room without meeting Muln’s gaze, wishing he had his cloak to wrap up in. The council room always seemed cold to him, and today was no exception. He took a seat in the chamber’s anteroom and went over again in his head the report they’d delivered. Each of them had written up their own and then given verbal reports, as well. Muln’s reasons for searching the Isani facility sounded perfectly reasonable in his report, with no mention of his lack of cooperation. In fact, it made Bruck sound downright negligent, the more he thought about it. While Muln wasn’t the golden boy Kenobi was, he was a lot higher up in the Council’s good graces than Bruck. In fact, he’d been shocked when they’d appointed him mission leader instead of Muln. Garen’s status and his interpretation of events, added to Bruck’s very public threat this afternoon had probably made him look like an incompetent, at the very least, and a reckless hothead at worst.

 _What you are_ , he thought with resignation, _is a self-destructive asshole, Chun._

As if to prove his assessment, Muln exited the council chambers and threw him a sly, barely discernible smile. The meaning was almost telepathically clear, at least to Bruck. _You’re screwed, Chun._

 _Fucking Muln,_ Bruck thought. _One of these days, I actually will kill him. And I won’t be sorry about it, either. —And that’ll be the end of your career as a Jedi, you moron,_ he could almost hear Ben’s tart retort.

“Padawan Chun?” the chamberlain called.

 

Chun was so screwed.

Garen threw him an almost invisible smirk as he waltzed out of the council chambers. He knew Chun caught it by the sudden smoldering fury in his eyes. Maybe now that Chun had had a little responsibility and fucked it up, the Council would decide he was a hopeless case and ship his ass out the way they should have a long time ago.

On the other hand, Garen thought he’d come out of this smelling pretty good. Okay, maybe they should have spent less time searching the prison and more time trying to get into the transfer files to find out where Kenobi’d been taken. That delay had cost them—and cost Kenobi too, there was no denying it—and Garen felt bad about that. He’d seen how it had affected Master Jinn, too, so maybe there was something to the bonds Bruck nattered on about. There was certainly something between Kenobi and Jinn. His own bond with Clee was nothing much, just enough to give them some sense of each other’s emotional state and occasionally to let her goose him when he wasn’t paying attention, but she hadn’t had to do that in years. Basically, they hadn’t had much use for their bond since Garen had become a senior padawan.

There was one more thing he wanted to do before he found Clee to let her know how it went. He was pretty sure Chun was just bullshitting him about Kenobi’s hands—there wasn’t much the healers and their droids couldn’t fix—but he wanted to make sure so he could throw that taunt back in Chun’s face later.

Luckily, he ran into Tianna just inside the halls and flagged her down. She was a newly minted Healer now, only promoted a quarter before.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said in a voice just next door to frozen hydrogen.

Garen wondered what that was all about. “Hey Tianna. How’s Kenobi doing? He’s out of the bacta, right?”

“No thanks to you. And no thanks to you, he might just lose the use of his hands, Garen.”

Garen’s stomach did a flip. Chun hadn’t been shitting him. “Wait a minute! No thanks to me?”

“Everybody knows how much you despise Bruck, but he was your mission leader and it’s pretty obvious that your decision to go off half-cocked on your own left Ow high and dry for just long enough to get to himself badly mangled. Does that answer your question? Good. Now piss off.”

Garen just stood gaping after her as she turned and strode away from him. He’d never seen her in such a mood. And how would she know—oh, of course. The healers would have access to all their mission reports. For the first time, he began to wonder if maybe he should have gone along with Chun, just for the sake of the mission. For Kenobi’s sake.

 

His insides now in knots, Bruck got to his feet and re-entered the council chamber. He stopped and bowed, standing alone in front of Windu, who’d been doing most of the questioning, as usual. He’d been here so many times before, on his own, usually on his knees, that he hardly thought about it anymore. Usually. This time it seemed different somehow, though he couldn’t say why.

“Just a few more questions, Padawan Chun. Tell me about your bond with Knight Kenobi. What made you so certain he wasn’t at the first facility anymore?”

“It’s not very strong, Masters. Not like a good training bond, or anything like what he’s got with Master Jinn. I can’t sense what he’s thinking or feeling or doing. But I know when he’s near, and even when he’s not—say when I’m at temple and he’s out on a mission—I still have a, an awareness of him, if I concentrate. It’s stronger when we’re in close proximity. If I come in from a mission and he’s here, I know it without checking the roster. I’ve never been wrong.”

“So you could sense he wasn’t nearby anymore, when his tracking device failed.” It was less a question than a statement.

“Yes. I was positive they’d taken him off-planet.”

“But nothing alerted you as to when they’d done it?”

“No. It’s not that kind of bond. It wouldn’t wake me out of sleep. It hasn’t ever before. I had to think about it to know he was gone, when I realized we weren’t getting signal anymore.”

Windu nodded, apparently accepting his explanation, though it was hard to tell with the big councillor, he was always so stonefaced. Master Yoda’s ears were up, however, which was usually a good sign.

“You knew you had no jurisdiction in the Corporate Sector, yet you made it plain that you were Jedi by using your lightsaber . Did you consider the consequences? We have something of a diplomatic snarl on our hands now, as a result.”

“I’d do it again, Masters,” Bruck replied without hesitation. “We were in imminent danger and if we didn’t get out, the mission would have failed. The Agency was already an illegal presence there and they created the problem, not us.” _Hey, send Qui-Gon in. He’ll smooth it all over,_ he wanted to say. He quashed the thought quickly as Master Yoda’s ears went up a little higher and a mischievous glitter appeared in his eyes.

“Very well. Thank you, Padawan Chun. Our congratulations on a successful mission. May the Force be with you.”

“Thank you, Masters. And with you,” Bruck replied, bowed, and headed for the door.

“Oh, Padawan Chun,” Windu added. Bruck stopped and turned around, waiting resignedly for the final cutting remark. Windu could never seem to let him go without kicking his ass verbally. “That little conversation you had with Padawan Muln this afternoon? Don’t do that again. At least not in public.”

Bruck blinked, caught off guard at Windu’s sudden tolerance, and then nodded. “Yes, Master.” He’d expected a much harsher reprimand, but he’d be damned if he’d apologize.

“Time to get our bets down you will give us though,” Master Yoda added.

Windu looked exasperated and annoyed but Bruck grinned and gave an insouciant bow. “Of course, Master Yoda.” The rest of the Council made amused noises.

“Go away, Chun,” Windu sighed.

 

* * *

 

 

Obi-Wan started awake, breathing harshly, too much of the whites of his eyes showing in the semidarkness of his room in the healers halls. Qui-Gon got up from his chair, where he’d been reading his datapad—it wasn’t very late yet—and moved toward him, bringing up the light beside his bed. Obi-Wan flinched back against the pillows and stared at him with wild eyes for a moment until recognition set in. Then he shuddered a little and closed his eyes, sighing.

“All right, _kosai_?” Qui-Gon murmured, and brushed his lips over Obi-Wan’s forehead, tasting sweat. “You’re a little warm.”

“I’m fine,” he responded, sounding entirely too lucid despite the drugs he was on. “ Just a bit disoriented.”

“Were you dreaming?”

“I suppose I was. I thought I was back in that cell, afterwards. That’s . . . going to stay with me for a while, I’m afraid.”

“I’d be surprised if it didn’t.”

“The others, the Isani, I got the sense they were just doing a job, one they didn’t like very much. It’s why they were so rough. They wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. I don’t think they were trained very well. It’s really their superiors I blame for contravening the conventions. But that Agency—bitch,” he said it with such venom that it startled Qui-Gon. “The last one. It was more than a job to her. It was a vocation. A calling.”

“Did she suspect you were Jedi?”

“She knew I wasn’t an insurgent. I thought about telling her.”

“But you didn’t.”

“She never gave me a chance. She never _asked_ ,” he spat. “She just . . . hurt me. She hurt you. Until I passed out.” He was quivering with rage, breathing hard. What came through the bond was nauseating hate and the echo of a terrible fear that it sprang from. “I want her, Qui. I want her taken out of action. I want her dead.”

“The painkillers are wearing off. Your hands hurt,” Qui-Gon murmured. Obi-Wan nodded. “Time for another dose, then.” Qui-Gon peeled the old patch off and replaced it with a fresh one, then sat stroking his fingers through the younger man’s hair. Gradually, the rage and pain faded out of the bond, Obi-Wan’s lashes fluttered, his breathing slowed, and he slipped into sleep.

Qui-Gon went back to his chair, shaken, and not sure what to do.

 

* * *

 

 

Bruck sat in the refectory picking at his breakfast in a daze. He had no classes anymore, wasn’t yet cleared for sparring because of his injury and felt more than a bit at a loss. This morning, he’d slept in and his master had let him, but when he’d finally gotten up, everything had suddenly changed, with absolutely no warning. _I have some good news and some bad news, Padawan,_ Andreth had said when he’d finally wandered bleary-eyed out to the table. _Gimme the bad news first,_ Bruck had sighed, stirring his tea. _The bad news is that Garen Muln has failed his trials. The good news is that you didn’t._

At which point he had dropped both his jaw and his cup.

Andreth had laughed uproariously at that, and seemed not at all surprised by the news or his padawan’s reaction. Of course, he’d known the whole time that their mission had been both padawans’ trials. Apparently there’d been a long-standing bet and Andreth had collected quite a few credits from Mace Windu.

Figures Windu would bet against him.

He ought, he supposed, to feel happier than he did. After all, it was nothing short of a miracle. He’d pretty much resigned himself to his apprenticeship being an exercise in futility; he’d expected to fail his trials and go somewhere else with his education if he lived through them, and make a new life for himself. Instead, he’d passed. And Muln, his nemesis and arch-pain-in-the-ass, hadn’t. He wasn’t sure which part of the equation stunned him more.

So why wasn’t he happier about it? Why wasn’t he, in fact, ecstatic? Why wasn’t he rubbing Garen’s fucking nose in it? Why hadn’t he even told Isa yet? Or anyone else, for that matter?

Disgusted with himself, Bruck quit picking at his food, got up and bussed his tray and was just turning away when he was hit by a tall, red-headed missile that nearly knocked him back into the wall. He had an instantaneous flashback of running into Ben at nearly the same place six years before. But this red-head was a little taller and much more boisterous and not averse to wrapping her long legs around his waist in public, which she did now, whooping deafeningly in his ear and hugging him hard enough to crush the air out of him. He struggled for a moment to get his balance and free his arms then wrapped them around her and squeezed back.

“ _Knight_ Chun!” she yelled and whooped again. He decided the only way to shut her up was to kiss her, so he did.

“Easy, Hypergirl,” he laughed a couple of hot, pulse-pounding minutes later.

She unwrapped her legs from his waist and instead started to bounce in front of him, arms still around his neck, living up to her nickname. “I knew you’d do it! I knew it I knew it I knew it! Didn’t I tell you? Now you can tell Windu to go piss in his boot, just like Master Jinn.”

“Shhhhh! They haven’t cut my braid yet. I’m sure they’ll have second thoughts if they hear you saying stuff like that about me. And it’s really distracting when you jump up and down like that,” he added, gaze following the motion of her breasts. He was half hard from the kiss and the scent of her body and the stimulation of her wriggling against him.

Isa frowned and stopped bouncing. “What’s wrong? I heard Muln bottomed out, too. Fitting for a bottom feeder.”

“What’s wrong is that Ben might lose the use of his hands,” Bruck said. “And that’s too big a price for my knighthood.”

“Have you told him? Or Qui-Gon?”

“No.”

Isa gave him a disgusted look. “You are such a jerk sometimes, B-Boy. I assume he can have visitors?”

“Yeah, but—”

She grabbed his hand and dragged him out of the refectory without another word.

 

It was a different scene this time, but similar to the one from yesterday: Ben dozing, or appearing to be, Qui-Gon in a chair near the bed. This time, it was drawn up closer, and Qui-Gon’s elbows rested on the edge of the mattress, his hands arcing over Obi-Wan’s, a soft glow leaking through his own fingers. Bruck and Isa watched silently, not wanting to disturb them. Finally, the glow softened and Qui-Gon sat back, looking a little drained, still unaware of his visitors.

“Healing meditations?” Bruck said.

Qui-Gon looked up and smiled. “Something like that. He has a hard time concentrating through the painkillers, so I help him into the trance.”

Bruck had a feeling that wasn’t quite what had been going on, but said nothing.

“In between lesson plans?” Isa asked, nodding at the stack of chips and datapad stacked on the bedside table.

“Yes. Advanced Intercultural Relations, as it happens.”

Isa made a face and Qui-Gon chuckled. “I still haven’t studied for the exam.”

“I thought you might be getting a refresher on the Corporate Sector after our little fiasco,” Bruck said.

“That remains to be seen. I rather think it’s more the Agency’s problem than ours, though we seem to do a lot of cleaning up after them.”

“How’s he doing?” Bruck nodded toward the bed.

“About the same, with a bit of a difficult night thrown in. He’s having flashbacks, which is not surprising.”

“No,” Bruck agreed, gaze shifting nervously from Qui-Gon to Ben and back again. “I have some news, if you haven’t heard it already.”

“About your trials?”

“You knew, then.”

“I suspected. The teaming was a good indication, at least to a practiced eye. I assume we’ll be welcoming you to the ranks shortly.”

“But not Garen.”

“Ah. I see,” Qui-Gon replied, not seeming at all surprised. “You’re an interesting contrast, you two: Garen’s mistakes caught up with him, finally, and you managed to leave yours behind while still learning from them.”

“I think I have you to thank for it, as much as anyone else.”

Qui-Gon waved his comment away. “All Andreth and I did was make sure you had a chance. You did the rest yourself, Bruck. Now, you need to share the news with Obi-Wan.”

“I don’t want to wake him.”

“He’d want to know. Go ahead. I find I’d like some tea,” Qui-Gon said, rising from his chair. “What about you, Isa?”

“Sure,” she agreed, winking at Bruck. “Maybe I can practice my negotiating skills and wheedle the exam answers out of you on the way.”

 

He swam up out of the trance gradually, the pain still distant and the light and warmth through the bond a steady comfort. Someone called his name and fingers combed through his hair gently. “Ben.” Then there were warm lips on his forehead, his cheek. “I’ve got some news for you.”

There was B-Boy looking down at him with a frown.

“What?” he rasped. Bruck held a straw to his lips, made him take a sip.

“You’re going to have to start calling me Knight Chun in a couple of days.”

It took a moment for it to sink in, but when it did he grinned hard enough to hurt. “Knew you’d do it,” he mumbled.

“Did you?” Bruck said. “Know this was my trials, I mean?”

“Knew it was Garen’s, not yours.”

“He failed them.”

“Failed? Nobody—”

“Fails? Apparently that’s not so. Unfortunately, the net gain for this mission doesn’t look so good, does it?”

Even through the fog of painkillers he could hear the bitterness in Bruck’s voice. He wanted to grab him, shake him, but had to settle for bringing his knee up under the covers to bump Bruck’s rump. “This’s not your fault. Not Garen’s. Just one person. She did this, not you. Not anybody else. You earned it.”

“I’m just not sure it’s worth it, if this mission leaves you crippled.”

He wanted to tell Bruck that he’d felt the same way, that Qui-Gon’s injury and near death had been too high a price to pay as well. He wanted to tell Bruck that there was always a price, for everything they did as Jedi, and they spent their lives paying it. He wanted to tell Bruck that the guilt faded after a while, or it had for him. He wanted to remind Bruck that he was already carrying around enough guilt without adding this load to it, when it had nothing to do with him. He wanted to say, besides, they didn’t know he’d be crippled, or if he were, how completely. It would be days, perhaps tens before they did. He wanted to say all those things, but the drugs made him stupid and inarticulate.

“Give it time,” was all he could manage for now. Some day, he might manage to tell Bruck that the tracking device had been meant to fail.

 

* * *

 

 

Qui-Gon dressed him for Bruck’s ceremony, not in the civilian party clothes he would have worn under better circumstances, but in his dress blacks, the theory being Obi-Wan was only staying for the ceremony and his leather pants would be too difficult for him to get into. It turned out to be rather more difficult getting him into his dress uniform than it usually was getting him out of it. “You’re the one who likes the pants so tight,” was Obi-Wan’s unsympathetic response. To get the tunic on, Qui-Gon had to slit the sleeves to get them over the metal frames bracing the bones in Obi-Wan’s fingers and then pin the cloth together. Thrifty as always, Qui-Gon did it carefully enough along the seams so the tunic could be mended later.

Under other circumstances, heObi-Wan would have enjoyed having his lover’s hands all over him; now it was just frustrating and somewhat humiliating because he could do so little for himself. At least the healers had finally let him come home. Though he’d felt fine aside from his hands, he’d fought Qui-Gon about that for a while, citing his utter inability to dress or feed himself or even wipe his own ass, but in the end, the desire to sleep in his own bed and Qui-Gon’s argument that he was already caring for him, which was true, won out.

It was a much smaller ceremony and party than his own knighting. Of course, his own friends had had much more time to plan and not as many of Bruck’s friends were in temple for the occasion, since it had occurred within a ten of passing his trials, rather than the half-year Obi-Wan had waited. The filing of forms and actual scheduling had taken longer than anything else, and Bruck’s vigil had gone off without any particular hitches, or at least he hadn’t been forthcoming about any.

Obi-Wan wished he’d been able to give Bruck the kind of celebration his friends had thrown for him at his knighting, but he considered himself lucky to be able to attend at all. He was glad to see that Isa managed to whip together a respectable group of their mutual friends from the circle she’d drawn him into, and a few of Bruck’s own, including Suri Asul. Bruck’s eyes widened when he noticed her face in the crowd at the ceremony, standing next to Isa. The two of them were chatting amiably and Suri winked at him when Bruck caught her eye. There were few of their own agemates there besides Obi-Wan: Bant, who’d made it a point of honor to support Bruck, and Tianna, who’d learned her own lesson in humility from him. Qui-Gon and Andreth and several other masters in their circle made their own appearances, only Qui-Gon staying on afterwards to make sure Obi-Wan would be able to leave when he needed to without spoiling anyone else’s fun. Mace, unsurprisingly, was not among the guests.

“He’s always been a sore loser,” Qui-Gon quipped when Obi-Wan pointed it out.

And Garen—nobody seemed to know where Garen had gone, though it was rumored he’d moved out of his quarters within hours of being told he’d failed.

Obi-Wan’s hands throbbed throughout because he’d let his pain medication wear off, wanting to be clear-headed for the ceremony, at least. This was the first he’d been without it since Bruck and Garen had extracted him from his cell, and it wasn’t pleasant. He’d almost reached the limits of endurance when Andreth finally cut his padawan’s braid and said the magic words: “Your padawan oaths to me are fulfilled. I release you. Rise, Knight Bruck Chun.”

Bruck went through the ceremony with a solemn yet somewhat stunned look on his face, as though he still couldn’t believe it. Since he couldn’t applaud, Obi-Wan started it by giving the same loud whoop Bruck had at his knighting. Isa, true to form, picked it up from there. Only then did Bruck start to grin like a bandit. He picked both Isa and Suri up in turn and swung them around, giving his own whoop, and got a hearty clap on the back from his master, who had to reach to deliver it.

Obi-Wan lost sight of him in the crowd of well-wishers and found himself a wall to lean against, taking it in with satisfaction and a pleased but tired smile.

“How are you feeling?” Qui-Gon asked.

“I’ll want a patch as soon as I can find a chair. B-Boy’s used to me being high when we’re out, but perhaps it will help ruin my reputation as the uptight knight if a few other people see me that way.”

“Not likely when it’s prescribed by the healers,” Qui-Gon said drily. “I’ll tell him we’ll meet him at the party, so you can get a seat and stay out of the crowd. I don’t want anyone jostling your hands accidentally.”

Obi-Wan winced at the thought. “Nor I.”

By the time Bruck finally caught up to them at the reception, Obi-Wan was ensconced in a chair and wearing the silly grin familiar from many nights of club-hopping together. Bruck leaned over and kissed him, giving it some attention and a great deal of affection. It brought a wider, sleepier smile to Obi-Wan’s face and another round of applause to the room that made Bruck laugh.

“Congraja’lations, B-Boy. Always knew you’d make it.”

“That’s Knight Chun to you, Kenobi.”

“‘M still senior t’you. But you get to be on top once in a while now.”

“Oooo, that’s worth the price of admission right there,” Bruck replied, smiling. “Thanks for coming. And for always being there when I didn’t have anybody else. I know I wouldn’t be here right now if you hadn’t. How’re you feeling?”

“Loopy,” he said. “Again. ‘N tired. ‘M gonna have to go soon. ‘M sorry.”

“I know. It’s okay. I think Isa can keep the party going without you. If I can keep her from prying my secrets out of Suri. I never should have let those two into the same room with each other.”

“Just make sure you enjoy it,” Obi-Wan admonished, carefully enunciating each word. “You deserve this. Promise me.”

Bruck looked uncharacteristically grave. “I will, Ben. I promise. Go home. Get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow at the healers.”

 

They walked back through the halls slowly, Obi-Wan a little unsteady on his feet and leaning into Qui-Gon, who had an arm around his waist. He was half asleep, really, letting Qui-Gon guide them, and barely noticed their surroundings. For the moment, he was content, though he would have liked to stay at the party. Bruck and he would have one of their own when—

“Obi-Wan.”

His eyes snapped open at the sound of the familiar voice and he pulled away a little from Qui-Gon, head clearing instantly as though he were ready for a fight, such were his first instincts. Qui-Gon apparently had the same reaction. He touched Obi-Wan’s elbow as though to draw him back, protecting him. It was easy to see why: the man standing in front of them wore civilian clothing and not just a blaster but a lightsaber as well. For a second Obi-Wan wondered how he’d gotten into this part of the temple. Then he realized who it was.

“Garen. I thought—”

“Thought I’d gone? Conveniently disappeared? Tail between my legs?” Obi-Wan was surprised to hear no bitterness in his voice, only regret. “Yeah, well, that’s the plan. At least until the hearing. I can’t get out of that. But afterwards, yeah, I’m gone.”

“You’re not joining the pilot corps?” That would have been the choice of most people with Garen’s abilities and training.

“No. I’ve, I’ve had enough of Coruscant. I just wanted to say I’m sorry. That’s all.”

And he was gone before Obi-Wan could reply. “He’s still got his saber,” Qui-Gon murmured to Obi-Wan. Having failed his trials, Garen had lost the right to wear it and his master should have seen to it that it had been destroyed.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Obi-Wan said quietly.

 

* * *

 

 

Bruck was indeed there in the healers’ waiting room when they arrived early the next morning, looking surprisingly alert despite what Obi-Wan suspected was a massive hangover. This time it was he who leaned over and kissed Bruck’s forehead, straightening up in time to catch the wince.

“That bad?”

“I haven’t been to bed yet. Just washed up.”

“Oh, that good, then,” Obi-Wan amended. “I’m glad.”

“I figured I’d just keep drinking if necessary. If, you know, it’s not—”

“If the news is that bad, we’ll stick a straw in it and I’ll join you,” Obi-Wan drawled.

“You’re awfully chipper for this early in the morning,” Bruck complained.

“Drugs will do that,” Qui-Gon said. “It’s about all that will. Or a good, hard f—”

Fortunately, the apprentice healer minding the clinic called Obi-Wan then. He followed her, shooting Qui-Gon a glare over one shoulder. When he’d gone, Bruck looked over at Qui-Gon, who was smirking slightly, and started to laugh. It very nearly got out of control, but he managed to rein it in before he lost it completely.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m still trying to get a grip on everything. I mean—”

“Perfectly understandable,” Qui-Gon replied, ignoring the unfortunate pun.

“I’m surprised you didn’t go in with him.”

“That was Obi-Wan’s idea. He said he—he preferred some time to digest the news alone.”

“He thinks it’s going to be bad, then.”

“Yes,” Qui-Gon said heavily.

 

“Would you like a moment, or shall I call Master Jinn?” Healer Valerin asked him gently.

“I’ll, I need a moment, please. I’ll find him,” Obi-Wan answered, hardly aware of what he was saying. Part of him was still thinking, _It hasn’t even been two tens; how can they be sure?_ and another part of him had known the verdict all along. He could feel it. Most of the joints were fusing, losing mobility. He had two options; well, three, really: break apart the joints that were fusing and try again, this time with an articulating external brace and a painful regimen of physical therapy to keep the joints limber; replace both hands with prosthetics; or wait and see how completely the joints fused. In other words, learn to live with it. The latter choice would end his career in the field.

He looked at his hands, still swollen and bruised, lying in his lap like useless lumps, and shuddered. He didn’t remember much of how they’d been turned into this, thankfully. Shock had taken care of that, though he knew it was buried somewhere deep in his mind. Occasionally the memory surfaced in his sleep or when the painkillers first kicked in, when his defenses were down. As a rule, though, all that was readily accessible these days was the pain and the hate. He hated the woman who had done this because it was better than self-pity. He hated her, though he knew it was wrong, because it gave him strength to keep from giving up. And he hated her because he couldn’t stop himself—and because it was better than blaming Garen. Still, it was hard to feel much sympathy for him when he knew Garen’s inability to follow Bruck’s orders had left him in that woman’s clutches.

Through the bond came a sudden wash of warmth and love from Qui-Gon that nearly broke him. Valerin had told him, then. He knew if he didn’t appear soon, Qui would come after him to make sure he was all right. He wanted to have his mind made up before then, to be resolute about something so he didn’t go to pieces in the face of Qui-Gon’s sometimes relentless tenderness. It was time to make some decisions.

The third option was no option at all, as far as he was concerned. She would win then, and he was not going to let that happen. The second option wasn’t much better, but he would take it as a last resort, to save his career, though the idea of never again being able to touch Qui-Gon with his own hands made him sick. So, that meant a quarter-year, possibly a half-year of pain and helplessness and hard work. Valerin had mentioned returning to Arkania, and perhaps that would be best. Qui couldn’t be expected to take care of him for that length of time.

And he’d have to keep Bruck from going after Garen, wherever he was. The thought made him smile. At least that had gone right. Bruck was knighted, despite Xanatos, against all of Mace’s expectations, and the expectations of many others. His stubborn perseverance had paid off.

Surely there was a lesson to be learned there, he thought. He got up and tripped the door’s motion sensor, then walked out to find Qui-Gon and Knight Chun.


	2. Fire

“This is what I would miss,” Obi-Wan murmured, his fingers gliding over the skin on Qui-Gon’s chest so lightly that he could barely feel it. If he closed his eyes, he would not know whether he were imagining it or not. It didn’t matter that Obi-Wan’s fingers were encased in rigid braces; his fingertips were bare and they stroked over him so softly that it raised cold flesh on his arms.

“I would too, _kosai_ ,” he admitted, shivering a little at the sensation. “But the decision is still yours to make. Whatever you decide, I will support you.”

They were lying together in their bed, Obi-Wan’s head on his shoulder, one caged hand resting upright against Qui-Gon’s hip, the other leisurely mapping his torso.

“I don’t think I could bear not being able to touch you again with my own hands, Qui. I have to at least try, even if it makes things worse in the end.”

And they both knew it might. The risk of rebreaking the crushed finger joints that were now fusing together was that they might only fuse more solidly the second time around, too traumatized to ever heal correctly. He would lose all ability to grip and hold anything where he now retained at least some, though it was not enough to be truly useful. After that, the only option would be prosthetics or retirement from field duty.

They’d spent the morning with the healers, having those options explained in great detail. Then they’d come home and spent hours deconstructing the possibilities and the risks, weighing everything as carefully as they’d weighed the mission that had led to this predicament. They talked through midmeal, the afternoon, through lastmeal, through the evening and into bed, even though they’d both known already what decision Obi-Wan would make, and that he had already in fact made. In the end, it still came down to the touch of his fingertips tracing the hidden shapes of Qui-Gon’s muscles and bones.

Still, Qui-Gon agreed with him that it was better to try for a complete recovery than to give up and live either with a crippling injury or prosthetics he would loathe. The latter they would hold in reserve as a last resort. He was also adamant in vetoing a solo return to Arkania where Obi-Wan would be cared for by virtual strangers, Jedi or not. Qui-Gon would not hear of it. “I already have a very intimate acquaintance with your ass, love. What difference does it make whether I’m wiping it or fucking it?”

Obi-Wan had looked around for something to throw at him when he’d said that, then realized he couldn’t hold anything anyway, and briefly considered using the Force. But it did make him laugh, as Qui-Gon had intended, and released some of the tension the conversation was fraught with. Qui-Gon didn’t have to ask him if he was frightened; it was evident through the bond as a kind of sourness where there was usually the taste of sweet tea—like milk suddenly gone bad. Jedi were not supposed to be vain about their appearance, but losing the use of one’s hands was something quite different from mere vanity.

What worried Qui-Gon was not so much Obi-Wan’s apprehension, which was understandable, or even his physical injuries—they would find a way to cope with those—but his mental state. He was still having vivid flashbacks involving the Agency interrogator and his hate for her was intense and uncontrolled. There was no doubt she was a rogue who needed to be brought to heel; anyone who would first flay the skin off then crush the bones in someone’s fingers, whether in the process of interrogation or not, was a monster. But Obi-Wan’s feelings weren’t healthy, especially for a Jedi. Those feelings were something he hadn’t yet acknowledged or begun to address, and he would have to, to heal himself. Qui-Gon hoped it would begin to happen as his physical injuries improved, and he would do his best to coax that process along.

But for now, he would live in the moment with his lover.

He’d always loved Obi-Wan’s hands on him. He had an uncanny sense of where to be firm and where to just barely touch, and over the years he’d become so familiar with the portions of Qui-Gon’s anatomy that were particularly susceptible to a lover’s ministrations that he could find them in his sleep—and sometimes did. That knowledge hadn’t changed, but Obi-Wan’s ability to use it had. It was almost as though they were brand new lovers learning each other, tentative and a little awkward. Now, Obi-Wan continued to trace a path from Qui-Gon’s navel to the hollow between his collarbones and slowly back again. Qui-Gon lifted Obi-Wan’s face with fingers cupped under his chin and kissed him softly. For the barest moment, there was no response, then Obi-Wan returned it without deepening it and pulled back a moment later, nestling down against Qui-Gon’s shoulder once again, his fingertips traversing Qui-Gon’s skin in an almost hypnotic manner.

Qui-Gon shifted onto his side a little, cradling Obi-Wan’s head on his upper arm and returned the caress. He ran his palm over Obi-Wan’s hip and thigh, to the back of his knee, which he coaxed upward to tangle their legs. Mindful of the wounded hand that lay between them and the one that had dropped to his own hip, Qui-Gon slid his palm back up over hip and ribs, curving over to Obi-Wan’s back and down his spine until his fingers found his own monogram. He traced it first then stroked over it, watching Obi-Wan’s eyes flutter and close in pleasure.

—and watched them fly open in panic as he dipped lower.

It was a purely instinctual reaction that startled Obi-Wan more than it did his lover, who had been half expecting it. Unthinkingly, he looked up at Qui-Gon with guilt in his eyes and reached out to pull him closer. As his hand made contact, he yelped and flinched away as though he’d grabbed something hot and curled around it protectively. Afraid to touch him for fear of accidently bumping his hands again, Qui-Gon drew back and Obi-Wan shot him a look full of frustration and sadness.

Eventually, the pain subsided and Obi-Wan carefully moved closer, entwining their legs once again, his hands carefully cradled between them.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “It’s not you.”

“Too soon?”

“No! It’s not that.” He was silent for some time then. The bond felt—unquiet, was the only way Qui-Gon could describe it. Obi-Wan was searching his feelings. In the meanwhile, Qui-Gon combed his fingers tenderly through Obi-Wan’s silky hair.

After a while, the younger man sighed. “I don’t know what it is, Qui. It’s not that I don’t want to be touched by you. I just don’t, my—” He stopped again, still at a loss for words.

“You don’t feel like making love. Is that it?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, you know, if you don’t. You’re allowed to say that to me.” Qui-Gon tempered the words with a wry smile.

“I never have before,” Obi-Wan countered in a miserable tone.

“No, but I’ve said it to you, if you’ll recall. For probably the same reason when I was recuperating. I’m not surprised. And I don’t mind.”

“I mind.”

“Are you afraid your body won’t respond?”

Obi-Wan closed his eyes and let out a slow breath. “Among other things.” It was almost a whisper.

Qui-Gon wondered if this were the place and time to broach the particular question that had been stirring in the back of his mind since Obi-Wan’s first flashback, and decided there probably wasn’t a good time. “I know what she did to your hands, _kosai_. Was there more?”

“For fuck’s sake, Qui. Just say it,” he snapped. “You mean, aside from the Isani shoving a baton up my ass, did she do anything sexual? And is that what’s turning my libido off? That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

“Very well. Did she? Is it?”

But Obi-Wan wouldn’t answer. His face became an unreadable blank and then he rolled over, awkwardly, out of Qui-Gon’s arms, and curled up beneath the covers as though he were cold. Qui-Gon wanted to touch him again—a hand on his shoulder or on his hip, better yet to curl up with him, around him—but Obi-Wan had made it clear he wasn’t having any. Instead, turned off the light with a flick of Force and turned over himself, facing the opposite way, as though they were two strangers. Sometime during the night, he knew, they would come together again in their sleep, but for now, he would give Obi-Wan the privacy of his own body and his own thoughts until he was ready to share them again.

The subject wasn’t broached again in the morning. And later that day, just two days after Bruck’s formal knighting, Obi-Wan found himself back in the Healers Halls, lying nervously under the thin sheet, waiting to have several of his finger joints broken.

 

_He woke up vomiting a thin stream of bile and acid into a steel bowl, barely aware of someone cradling his throbbing head and wiping his mouth. The sensation was something like his worst hangover compounded with a concussion and the aftereffects of being pounded in the salles. Something was horribly wrong. What else had she done to him? Why couldn’t he remember?_

_The room smelled of blood and metal. It turned his stomach and he retched a little harder. He was still in that cell. He’d never get out. Every part of him hurt, not just his hands. He had to get out. Had to get away. Before she flayed him everywhere. He started to turn, scrambling to get off whatever surface he was on, to get away, and banged one hand against something hard._

_The pain was excruciating. It roared up through his arms and into his head like a runaway maglev overshooting the station. He thought the top of his head might come off with the impact._

_“Lie still, love,” a familiar voice said with quiet authority, large and gentle hands holding his shoulders down firmly as he writhed against the pain, trying to breathe without screaming. “It’s all right. It will pass. Hush, love. It will pass.”_

_And it did, slowly, leaving him nauseated and shivering beneath the sheet, even while Qui-Gon was mopping the sweat from his face. And what was Qui-Gon doing in that cell with him? He closed his eyes, though he hadn’t realized he’d opened them, breathing shallowly in thin sips of air. Fingers that weren’t Qui-Gon’s touched his forehead and he flinched away as an unfamiliar presence pushed the desire to_ sleep _into his mind. It was too strong and he was too weak to fight it. Instead, he let it carry him down and away from the pain and the terror of being in that cell, hoping he wouldn’t wake to it again._

 

Qui-Gon watched him swim slowly up to consciousness once more, checking for signs of returning distress, relieved at seeing none. They’d moved him to a room now and he was on his side in a comfortable bed, pillows tucked beneath his head and between his knees. His hands, encased in a new set of articulating braces, rested against others in front of him. A fine tremor slid through him and he stirred unquietly, legs twitching beneath the covers like an animal chasing prey in its sleep. Small noises of discomfort slipped from him, but he didn’t seem to be ill this time. His eyelids fluttered as though he were dreaming, then opened. Obi-Wan looked around blearily, gaze finally lighting on Qui-Gon’s features. He blinked and smiled.

“Better?” Qui-Gon asked, sweeping aside the veil of fine red hair that had fallen into his face.

“Definitely,” he croaked, then took a sip from the straw held to his lips. “Much better,” he amended in a stronger voice when the water went down and made no signs of making a return trip. “That was distinctly unpleasant.”

Qui-Gon pressed a kiss to his temple and leaned back into his chair beside the bed. “Yes it was,” he agreed, “but it seems to happen from time to time, so the healers say. You had a reaction to the anesthetic.”

“Probably from all the crap I’ve ingested at the clubs,” Obi-Wan muttered.

“That seems doubtful,” Qui-Gon said with a slight smile. “More likely a sensitivity to this specific compound. But you’ll be glad to know the surgery went as well as was expected. Physical therapy starts in a few days. In the meanwhile, you have a visitor.”

Bruck leaned over and kissed his cheek before he had time to look up. “Hey, nobody made you snort all those snappers. You could learn to drink like a civilized person instead.”

“No, you’re right,” Obi-Wan agreed, sleepily. “Strictly my own choice. And I’m never doing it again. I’ve gone right off them after this. Thanks for dropping by,” he added, stifling a yawn.

“I can’t stay. I’ve got a mission,” Bruck said, seeming strangely apologetic.

“Of course you do,” Obi-Wan replied, looking puzzled. “You’re just knighted. I’m surprised they let you hang round this long.”

“I was hoping they’d let me stay to, you know, help out. Like you did with Qui-Gon.”

“Oh,” Obi-Wan replied, suddenly cool. “And do what? Wipe my ass? Would that make you feel better?” He struggled over onto his back and pushed himself up with his elbows, wincing, then fixed Bruck with a cold look. “Let me tell you something, Knight Chun: I didn’t do this for you. I didn’t even know it was your trials. I knew it was Garen’s but that’s not why I volunteered either. I volunteered because I was the best available person for the task, and because it was my duty to find incontrovertible evidence of the systematic abuse of prisoners in contravention of the ‘Treatment of Combatants’ clause of the Republic’s _Articles of War_. And that’s what we did. All of us.”

Bruck returned the look stonily, the silence thick and uncomfortable. Qui-Gon did not interfere; it was not his fight. “Fine,” Bruck said at last, just as coolly. “Fine. You do your duty then, and get your hands working again, Knight Kenobi. And I’ll go do mine. Qui-Gon,” he nodded to the older man, turned, and was gone.

Obi-Wan collapsed back against the pillows and closed his eyes, breathing hard, face contorted in pain that wasn’t entirely physical.

“Should I write that off as another aftereffect of the anesthetic, or did you mean to be so offensive?” Qui-Gon asked in a tone usually reserved for delicate negotiations with hostile parties.

To his credit, Obi-Wan looked stricken and ashamed. “I don’t know,” he said in a voice so quiet that Qui-Gon could barely hear him.

 

The healers released him the next day and Qui-Gon walked him home to their quarters with a packet of pain patches and orders to report for physical therapy in three days. He’d been subdued and uncommunicative since the episode with Bruck, doing nothing but eating and sleeping—or feigning sleep to avoid conversation, Qui-Gon suspected. But it would be harder to avoid now in their own rooms.

Once inside, Obi-Wan threw himself onto their sofa and crossed his legs on the low table in front of it. Qui-Gon recognized the posture, which usually included tightly crossed arms, from his padawan days. It signaled brooding dissatisfaction with himself and an imminent round of painful self-flagellation. Of course, the crossed arms were impossible now, and one hand lay in his lap, the other on the cushion beside him. The lost expression on his face made what was usually somewhat comically exaggerated body language an illustration of pathos instead.

Qui-Gon suppressed a sigh and sat down on the table in front of him, lifting Obi-Wan’s bare feet—he’d worn soft, slip-on shoes instead of his boots home—into his lap. His palms stroked over the high instep and up to his ankles, then back down over the roughened heels and tender arch. Obi-Wan’s toes curled reflexively and he looked up with a crooked smile, his brows still drawn together but now in self-mockery.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m not the one you need to apologize to.”

“Yes, I do. Along with Bruck, when he gets back. You shouldn’t have had to witness that little scene. It was quite inexcusable behavior.”

“That will be up to Bruck to decide. I don’t know that it was inexcusable, but it certainly was undeserved.”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan agreed, looking away. “It was.”

If Obi-Wan had still been his padawan, Qui-Gon might have asked a few probing, open-ended questions designed to make his student think about why he had done and said what he had. But Obi-Wan was a grown man and a full knight, and he had long ago learned to ask those questions himself. That didn’t mean he always knew the answers. It was obvious he didn’t now.

“I wasn’t even angry with him,” he added sadly, looking down at his hands, still bruised and swollen from the latest round of surgery.

The articulation made this new set of braces neater yet somehow much more mechanical-looking. They were something like an open glove that slipped on over his hands, consisting of translucent flexiplass finger cradles joined on the palm and back of the hand by a lightweight black mesh that sealed adjustably at the wrist. The splints curved up around the tips of his fingers for now, but could be replaced with shorter ones to allow him more delicate use of his fingers—if the therapy kept the joints from fusing again. So soon after surgery, Obi-Wan’s fingers were still puffed up around and between the splints and mesh.

Unable to touch his hands, Qui-Gon continued instead to lavish attention on his feet. Obi-Wan leaned his head back against the cushions and closed his eyes.

“Is there still lotion in the table there?” Qui-Gon asked.

“I believe so,” Obi-Wan replied.

“Get it, would you, and I’ll rub your feet.”

“You’re already rubbing my feet,” Obi-Wan pointed out, but sat up and started to reach for the drawer in the table beside the sofa, then stopped. He gave Qui-Gon an inscrutable look and just held up his hands.

“You have a tool. Use it,” Qui-Gon replied.

Obi-Wan frowned. This sort of thing was generally seen as a frivolous use of the Force and vaguely disapproved of. It wasn’t an actual rule, as such, but they all learned as youngsters that the Force was not a toy to be used in pranks, or simply to make one’s life easier.

“Think of this as an opportunity to perfect your fine control. Does that ease your scruples?”

Obi-Wan gave it some consideration. “Somewhat,” he decided, and teased the drawer open carefully, then, not being able to see the bottle he was searching for, levitated all the contents of the drawer and dumped it carelessly on the table beside Qui-Gon, who raised an eyebrow at the clatter.

He picked out the container he wanted and motioned toward the drawer again. “Now you can put the rest of this back. Gently.”

“Yes, Master,” Obi-Wan sighed and replaced the drawer’s contents and shut it again. “At least if this doesn’t work I’ll have learned to compensate somewhat. And that was your point, wasn’t it?”

“Among others,” Qui-Gon admitted, rubbing his palms together to spread and warm the lotion and then picking up one of Obi-Wan’s feet.

The younger man gave himself up to Qui-Gon’s ministrations, and let his head fall back against the cushions again. “That feels wonderful,” he said in a drowsy voice after a few minutes. “It’s so good to be home again with you. And it’s always nice to be coddled a bit.”

“It’s good to have you home, _kosai_ ,” Qui-Gon agreed. “And to coddle you. But by far it’s best to know you’re not being hurt without reason.”

“It was a good enough reason,” he said in a subdued tone. “From a certain point of view. I’m just sorry you had to go through it too. I tried so hard to shield and I just couldn’t after a while.”

Qui-Gon’s thumbs worked into the ball of Obi-Wan’s foot carefully. “It’s not sharing your pain that I mind, it’s your suffering at all.”

“I wish you’d taken the sedatives they offered.”

“I’m not sorry I didn’t. I didn’t want to wake up and not know what had happened to you. Not knowing is worse than any physical suffering I might endure.”

“You’re a fool, then, Qui-Gon,” the younger man snapped, sitting forward, nearly quivering with sudden anger.

“Who’s more the fool? The fool, or the fool who follows the fool?” Qui-Gon replied mildly, his hands still smoothing over Obi-Wan’s foot. It was clear Obi-Wan would have gotten up and stalked away, but there was no clean and easy getaway from this position.

The younger man seemed to realize that. After a tense moment, he drew in a deep breath and sat back again, letting his head fall back once more and exhaling slowly.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said after a time. “I don’t ever remember being this touchy.”

“Do you think some meditation might help?” Qui-Gon gave the younger man’s foot a last caress, placed it gently in his lap and squeezed out another generous dollop of lotion into his palm. When it was sufficiently warmed and spread, he picked up Obi-Wan’s opposite foot and began to repeat the process. All the while, Obi-Wan watched him silently through his lashes, head back against the cushions.

“I haven’t had much concentration lately,” he said in a doubtful tone.

“Not surprising, considering you’ve been either drugged or in pain since you returned.”

“That’s not what I mean. I—”

Qui-Gon waited a moment, then prompted “Yes?” into the silence.

“I can’t stop thinking. About her. And what she did to me. I don’t understand it.”

“What she did to you or why you can’t stop thinking about it?”

“Either. It’s not as though I haven’t been through this before. That’s why the Council asked me to take this mission.”

“This wasn’t your pain trials. You knew you were going to be injured, but there was no priorly agreed-upon limit to it. Ideally, you should have been extracted before this much damage was done to you, but there were never any guarantees.” _You could have died there,_ Qui-Gon added to himself. Just thinking it made him feel physically ill.

“I know that, Qui. It wasn’t that. It was—hells, I don’t know!” he cried, raising his hands as though he wanted to run them through his hair. He looked at them, realizing what he had done, and lowered them to his lap again. “I don’t know, Qui. But I can’t quiet my mind. It’s like an animal on an exercise wheel. Round and round and round, with her in the middle.”

“Would you like me to meditate wi—”

“No!”

Qui-Gon studied his face, wondering what he was so afraid of, but once again, Obi-Wan had retreated into inscrutability.

“Not yet, at any rate,” he added more calmly. “I’d like to try and sort it out myself, first.”

Qui-Gon nodded gave the foot in his lap a last loving caress. “As you like, then,” he agreed.

 

For the rest of the day, Obi-Wan dozed intermittently and, when awake, immersed himself in a novel that took little thought but kept his mind occupied. He didn’t have the concentration for much else and there was precious little to do that didn’t require the use of his hands.

Late in the afternoon, he woke from a doze to find himself stretched out on the sofa, datapad on the table beside him, a light throw over him, Qui-Gon nowhere in evidence. What woke him was his stomach growling. He flung back the coverlet with the Force and got to his feet to find something to eat.

Qui-Gon, it turned out, was in the kitchen, apparently having had the same thought, though Obi-Wan couldn’t yet smell anything actually cooking. Not that Qui-Gon cooked much. He’d left that mostly to Obi-Wan during his apprenticeship and, while perfectly willing to eat anything his experimenting young padawan set before him, he was not much help otherwise. Obi-Wan had become a quite good cook himself, mostly through practice, a good grasp of basic techniques after a turn in the temple’s kitchens, and an innate sense of what ingredients and flavors went well with each other. Qui-Gon had always been more than happy to choose the wine for whatever meal Obi-Wan prepared, and there his culinary skills stopped.

Which meant it was likely to be stodgy, bland, one-pot meals or the refectory while he recovered.

“I suppose I could teach you to cook, while I’m mending,” Obi-Wan said, propping himself in the doorway to watch the impending crimes against perfectly good food.

“I suppose you could try,” Qui-Gon challenged, turning around. Slices of fruit were laid out on a cutting board in front of him and light glinted off the knife in his hand.

_The blade was fine and long and so sharp he hardly felt it as she made a neat circular cut around his wrist and from there up the center of each finger, back and front. It was only as she lifted the skin away and air hit the exposed nerve endings that he began to scream. . . ._

_He was crouched on the floor, knees drawn up, back jammed into a corner, hands cradled against his chest, the pain fading slowly away, leaving them throbbing quietly in time with his pounding heart. Where was he? Where? Where? Where? Was she still here? How had he gotten away? He opened his eyes and recognized nothing in the room around him. There was a counter, cupboards, a cold box, a tea set on a shelf. . . ._

_“Obi-Wan—”_

_Someone touched his knee and he scrabbled to his feet in panic, banging his head in the process. He saw stars, staggered and fell to his knees, felt hands close on his arms again, this time in an iron grip. “Obi-Wan!_ Kosai _, it’s all right. It’s all right. No one is going to hurt you. You’re safe now. Do you hear me? Obi-Wan? You’re safe.”_

It was Qui-Gon. Qui-Gon. Kneeling next to him. Holding him. Safe. He was safe. Safe. Safe.

He looked down at his hands, found them encased in a web of cloth and splints and—thank the Force—his own skin. They were shaking. But they were whole. The sight made him sob in relief. Qui-Gon’s hands left his arms and closed gently on his face, thumbs brushing over his cheeks. He blinked, felt moisture spill out. Qui-Gon was brushing it away with his thumbs.

 _“Kosai, kosai,”_ he murmured. “It’s all right, now. It’s all right.”

But it wasn’t. No matter how much they both wished it might be.

 

Once Obi-Wan had stopped shaking, Qui-Gon tucked him up on the sofa and held a cold pack to the swelling lump on his head. The bump didn’t seem serious, merely painful, and the swelling soon went down. When it had, Qui-Gon helped him drink a mug of strong, sweet tea. He still felt too ill by the time he’d finished it to eat anything, and had barely gotten the tea down. Now, he huddled beneath the coverlet, looking pale and drained.

“Try and sleep then,” Qui-Gon suggested. “I’ll be right here.”

Obi-Wan merely nodded and hunkered down more beneath the coverlet, until he was nothing but a compact ball on the sofa. Qui-Gon watched him until his breathing slowed and the bond stilled between them.

Only it didn’t quite still as it usually did when one of them was asleep and the other awake. Instead, images flitted through it, like fish in a dark, deep stream: never quite more than a glimpse or a shadow, never the whole. But even the glimpses were unpleasant, and he understood now what Obi-Wan had meant by saying his mind was going round and round. If this is what was running in the back of his consciousness all the time, it was no wonder he was having flashbacks.

Qui-Gon shuddered. That had been—simply terrifying: watching the awareness disappear in a breath from Obi-Wan’s eyes, replaced with confusion and fear, watching the eruption of relived pain double him over, hearing the scream it tore from him, and seeing the fear force him into that corner to protect himself, and then watching him trying to get away from an hallucinated danger and injure himself more. And yet, almost worse than that had been the shattered sob of relief, the release of tears as he came back to the here and now. Clearly, this experience had been far worse than anything in his pain trials, far worse than anything he’d ever tried to prepare himself for. Far worse than he could recover from by himself.

And Obi-Wan, when he woke again, agreed.

 

* * *

 

“Ti. Nice office.” Ow stood awkwardly in the door, having arrived within minutes of his initial call.

She grinned as she looked around with him. She’d only had her office for a little less than a quarter year and it still felt weird to her too, to be a full-fledged healer, but she guessed that wasn’t the source of his discomfort. When she’d last seen him, he had been radiating distress and pain beneath the calming effect of the sedatives, so neither his call nor his appearance at her door surprised her. If he hadn’t come to her soon, she would have gone to him. They’d been friends since childhood but this was neither the boy she’d grown up with, nor the man she’d come to know, though he’d become a familiar type. All too familiar, of late, thanks to the Chancellor’s new rules. But she would let him get to his reasons for being there in his own time.

“You can come in, you know,” she said, coaxing. “I have nice chairs and a comfy sofa, too. They gave me the whole playset. I even let people without appointments use them.”

He smiled weakly and stepped inside, almost reluctantly letting the door slide shut behind him. She came out from behind her desk and offered him a hug. That seemed to brighten his mood a little. Mindful of his hands, she let him move into her arms and was saddened to feel the trembling in his muscles. He squeezed her gingerly but with genuine affection, and she hugged him with all the enthusiasm and affection she usually displayed, letting go only when she felt him begin to move back, again standing still until he extricated himself, so she wouldn’t inadvertently bump his hands.

“I don’t think I ever congratulated you,” he said, sitting gingerly in one of the comfortable chairs in front of her desk, crossing his legs and laying his hands in his lap. She joined him, turning the other chair a little to face him. His shoulders were stiff and held too high, and one foot waggled nervously until he tucked it behind his calf.

“I think you were in the field when they promoted me. You’ve been gone a lot the last couple of years. You’re as popular with the Council as Qui-Gon.”

The smile he gave her was both self-deprecating and a little curdled around the edges. “Popularity’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” he said quietly.

Tianna mirrored the smile, but filled it with empathy. “No, I suppose not. How are your hands feeling?” It was painful to see him like this, without his usual good humor or mischief lighting his eyes, his posture tense and twisted like a DNA molecule, his hands encased in flexiplass. She still wanted to ream out Garen, wherever he’d gone, for leaving him to this.

He shrugged. “They hurt, but I’m more or less accustomed to it now. After a while one forgets what it was like not to hurt—” He cut himself off, looking embarrassed. “That sounds incredibly self-pitying, doesn’t it?”

“No,” Tianna assured him. “Sadly matter-of-fact, actually. It’s true, people do forget after a while. It’s a way of coping. I’m sorry, Ow. That’s not why you’re here though, is it?”

“No,” he replied, looking away. “No. The pain I can deal with, which shouldn’t surprise you.” He looked up and smiled ironically, but it was thin and haunted. “Ti, I—I think I need your help. Or some sort of help. I, I can’t sleep. I jump at everything. I snap at everyone, including people I love. I’m short-tempered, impatient, easily frustrated. I can’t meditate. And I’m—” he stopped in midsentence and looked away again. “I’m having flashbacks. Vivid ones.”

“You’re sure they’re not Force sendings? You’ve always been very sensitive that way.”

He shook his head. “No. There’s nothing of the Force in these. There’s a trigger, for one thing. Some kind of stimulus sets them off, usually: sharp pain, a voice, a phrase, a smell. Today it was Qui-Gon s-slicing fruit in the kitchen.” It worried her to hear him stumble over that particular word. “Occasionally they happen right on the edge of sleep, or as the painkillers take effect. I had one coming out of the anesthesia. Typical post-trauma reaction, I suppose.”

“There’s nothing typical about that, Ow, except its occurrence. It’s a little different for everyone, so the treatment’s a little different for everyone, too. Here’s the first thing we need to determine: do you want to work with me or with someone who doesn’t know you?”

He looked surprised and a little puzzled. “I, um, I hadn’t considered that. Would it make a difference?”

“It might to you. Not in quality, but in your level of comfort with it. Sometimes it’s better to unload really horrific stuff on a stranger. On the other hand, I know most of your personality quirks and dirty little secrets,” she said, smiling. “So I might catch something earlier that a different healer wouldn’t.”

And now he looked worried. He swallowed heavily, shifting in his chair. She leaned forward and touched his knee, felt him start to flinch away and then get it under control.

“I’m not saying you have to, or even that you should. I’m not pushing you away, Ow. I’ll gladly listen to whatever it is you need to say. It’s up to you.”

“I thought—this is your specialty, isn’t it?”

“One of them, yes. But there are others who’ve been doing this longer than I have. Some good people who would help you just as much, maybe more.”

“It’s just—I don’t—” he started and choked. Tianna grasped his wrists above the splint closures in lieu of taking his hands and held on. “You know,” he started slowly in a voice so soft that Tianna could barely hear him, “I haven’t been out of our quarters or the healers halls alone since I, since Bruck and Garen rescued me. Someone was with me whenever I was conscious in the healers halls, and Qui walked me home. When I commed you just a bit ago, then walked into the hall on my way here—It’s ridiculous, but I don’t feel safe with people I don’t know,” he whispered. “I was shaking all the way here on my own, through the Temple halls. Isn’t that absurd?” His smile was sickly now, on the verge of tears.

That wasn’t good. They had to stop this now, before it crippled him as surely as his crushed hands would without therapy. Tianna squeezed his wrists gently.

“Then we’ll get started right away.”

“Thank you,” he gasped, as though he’d been saved from drowning. Tianna wished it were that simple.

 

It was anything but, and neither Obi-Wan nor his former master were prepared for just how un-simple it was. Or how painful. And it was made all the more urgent by the impending start of his physical therapy, which was sure to trigger some kind of reaction—and the upcoming hearing before a Senate panel.

The following days were, in retrospect, some of the hardest yet in Obi-Wan’s life. He spent hours with Tianna, sometimes with Qui-Gon also sitting in, learning how to deal with the flashbacks and piecing together exactly what had happened to him under Agency interrogation. It was disturbing how little he remembered—or, rather, how much he had blocked out. They did their best to prepare him for the flashbacks the pain might trigger, and Tianna taught them both techniques to ground him in the present in the middle of one, just in case.

It was almost an anticlimax to actually begin his physical therapy. The evaluation and initial exercises were painful but not excruciating, and he was told to take it slowly. The flashback he’d expected did not appear, though he slept worse than usual that night. The daily sessions with Tianna turned out to be much harder, and much more likely to trigger a flashback. In the tenday that followed, he had several, all in her office rather than in public, thankfully. Obi-Wan wasn’t sure he could bear the shame of having one in the middle of the Temple’s halls. Having one during his upcoming testimony was simply unacceptable.

For Obi-Wan, no matter how safe Tianna made sure he felt, it was terrifying to sit in her office and dredge up his memories—something he would have to do for the Senate without going to pieces. Afterwards, he was either emotionally shattered and completely exhausted or nearly quivering with rage and nervous energy.

For Qui-Gon, it was excruciating to watch Obi-Wan struggle with himself this way, and to watch the side effects of that struggle, which were as much physical as mental. His appetite, which had been intermittent at best, now disappeared entirely and it took a great deal of coaxing to get him to eat. Always restless at night, his sleep was now broken or absent. All too often, Qui-Gon would wake in the night to an empty bed and find Obi-Wan standing at the window, with his hands tucked against his chest. Never a voluntary early riser, the lack of sleep kept him far later abed than usual and left him hollow-eyed and lethargic.

And there were still some memories Obi-Wan could not recover—or would not face.

 

* * *

 

As first missions went, this one had been relatively short and particularly sweet, though considerably more difficult than many first missions went, Bruck suspected. Though he’d been teamed with Isa and her master, Bruck had carried out the brunt of the work and borne the responsibility for the mission’s success himself. It had been something of a chore to find Ben’s torturer again, given the covert nature of the both the Agency itself and this particular operation, and Ben’s inability to give them much of a description in his drugged and injured state. Hence the presence of Master Ituri and Isa, two of the Order’s own best covert field agents.

But as far as Bruck was concerned, Isa and Master Ituri were there strictly as backup and intelligence gatherers. They’d planned it out together, but it had been Bruck who’d been inserted, Bruck who’d made the capture, and Bruck who’d brought his prisoner out. It hadn’t been easy and he hadn’t escaped unscathed, but he had her. It should have been deeply satisfying to be able to bring her in, but her capture had only reminded Bruck of the reason for it, and made him wonder if Kenobi would be in any better shape when he returned. He could only comfort himself with the thought that at least the woman who’d tortured Ben would spend some time in the protective custody of the Jedi and stand before the Senate to answer for her crimes—and hopefully spill on the Agency as well.

All of that paled beside seeing Kenobi standing at the landing pad when the ship’s ramp was lowered. Ayana and Isa brought their prisoner up behind him as he stood at the top of the ramp.

“Is that Obi-Wan?” Isa asked, her voice showing her surprise.

“Yeah. Hold off a couple of minutes, will you? I want to talk to him first before we—”

“Before our reunion?” their prisoner purred.

“You will shut the hell up, or you’ll be taken out of here unconscious,” Bruck snapped, turning on her coldly. “And it won’t be a drug that does it.” Shrugging into his cloak, Bruck strode down the ramp, searching Kenobi’s face for some sign of his mood. He looked, well, bad, in a word. He’d lost more weight and his face was frighteningly gaunt, his eye sockets still shadowed with sleeplessness. The good signs were that his posture was ramrod straight and his eyes looked clear, though they were green as the Adegan crystal in his saber.

“What are you doing here, Ben? How are you?”

Kenobi smiled. “I wanted to congratulate you on the successful conclusion of your first solo mission, Knight Chun. Then to apologize for being such a shit before you left. You look a bit worse for wear. How bad was it?”

Bruck touched the raw scrape along his cheek lightly. It led to a shiner that ringed one eye. “It was fine, just a little disagreement about whether or not herself had booked a one-way trip back to Coruscant with Jedi Excursions.” Bruck took Ben’s arm and moved him aside, standing between him and his view of the ramp. Kenobi followed without protest.

“And that’s the final reason I’m here. Has she got a name?”

“Not that she’s telling us. Yet. Are you ready for this? I mean—”

“No, probably not,” Kenobi admitted, setting his jaw and frowning. “But you’re here now. She’s here now. And I’m better than I was.”

“You don’t have to prove anything to anyone,” Bruck assured him.

“Except myself.”

“You know, if your ass got any harder, Kenobi, it’d be duracrete,” Bruck sighed and shook his head. “How’re your hands?”

“Better. Still stiff, but I’ve got some mobility back. The PT seems to be working, but it’s going to take a while. Valerin’s pretty optimistic.”

That brought a broad grin to Bruck’s face. “Good. That’s good. And the flashbacks?”

Kenobi looked surprised. “You knew about those?”

“Qui-Gon told me, when you were still doped up. How are they?” he repeated.

“Better. I’ve been talking to Ti and meditating. I think I’ve remembered most of what happened. You sure you’re okay? That eye looks bad.”

“Isa’ll kiss it and made it better. Honest, it’s just a black eye. Nothing’s broken. Does Tianna know you’re doing this?”

Kenobi nodded. “Yes. We talked about it this morning. She’s not happy about it either.”

“You don’t think you should take her advice?”

“I won’t know until it’s too late, will I? Besides, I’ve got to start somewhere. Better I see her for the first time here than in a Senate hearing, if it’s going to trigger something.”

“How’d you manage to convice Qui-Gon to let you come here alone?”

Obi-Wan smiled again. “I didn’t tell him.”

Bruck rolled his eyes and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “fucking idiot” and sighed. “All right. Do you want me to—”

“No. Just go get her. Let’s get this over with.”

“If you say so,” he agreed reluctantly and turned back to the ship.

Very shortly, Bruck reappeared, escorting a small, blond, and somewhat disheveled figure down the ramp and across the landing apron toward Obi-Wan. They’d taken no chances with her, Bruck having learned the hard way to not underestimate her. Her arms were bound behind her and she wore leg shackles as well, connected to the binders on her wrists. As the quartet made their way past Kenobi, the two of them made eye contact and Bruck saw Ben’s jaw tighten.

“Padawan Kenobi,” she said in a civil tone, as though it were a friendly meeting. “You look like a different person. Still got those sexy tattoos?”

“It’s Knight,” he corrected coolly, hands tucked into his cloak’s sleeves. “And has been for some time.”

“Come to gloat?”

“No. Just to see you brought to justice.”

She laughed then and lunged at him, and Bruck wasn’t sure whether he expected Kenobi to return the favor or run. He did neither, standing his ground as Bruck and Isa yanked her back hard by her binders.

“And not a moment too soon,” Kenobi murmured as she was manhandled past him, struggling and cursing.

Bruck was surprised when Ben swung in behind their little group and made himself part of her escort to the holding cells the Jedi used for special prisoners. There were never many in the cells and today hers was the only one occupied. Ben watched as her shackles were replaced with a tracking cuff and she was locked down. Once she was inside with the field on and guards posted, Kenobi turned on his heel abruptly and left Bruck, Isa, and Ayana to mop up the details of their mission without another word.

“Why do I get the feeling he’s running away?” Isa said uneasily but not without sympathy.

“Probably because he is,” Bruck replied, voice grim. “I think it’s about all he can stand.”

 

Several hours later, report completed and delivered, Bruck found Kenobi again in the refectory, sitting at a table in the corner with the ubiquitous mug of tea in front of him. His hands were curled around it, still in splints, but the liquid was cold and untouched. Bruck sat down across from him with a tray and, with a glance in Kenobi’s direction—one that elicited a quick, faint smile—dug in. He was halfway through his meal before Ben spoke. Then, it was in a soft, subdued voice Bruck barely recognized.

“How hard was it to find her?”

Bruck swallowed a mouthful. “Just easy enough that I think the Agency’s sacrificing her. Maybe she went just a bit too far with you and they’ve decided to cut her loose. I think she’s been running the interrogation program for the Isani, but I couldn’t get much out of her.”

“If you can’t, she’s a tough nut then.”

“She’s also a lost initiate. Wonder how we missed her?”

“Is that how you got this?” Ben reached across the table and turned his chin so he could see the bruise and scrapes. The touch was light and Bruck didn’t resist it, though Ben seemed far too interested in it for comfort.

“Yeah. She’s taught herself some skills. No finesse, but useful enough when you surprise somebody with them. I underestimated her at first.”

“I should have told you she was Force-sensitive.”

Bruck shrugged. “It’s just a bruise, Ben. Nothing tragic. And you weren’t lucid enough to tell anybody anything reliable when I left.”

“Certainly not sane enough,” he muttered, looking down into his mug as though it might tell him something.

“And now?”

He looked up again, expression guarded. “What do you think?”

“You held up pretty well on the landing pad,” Bruck observed. “And after.”

Ben gave him a sickly smile. “Not really. I was shaking all the way down to the cell and back. I shook for an hour afterwards. I wanted to curl up in a ball in the back of a closet in our quarters.”

The admission made it hard for Bruck to swallow suddenly. “But you didn’t, did you?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t run to Qui-Gon, either.”

“No. Or Ti. I came here. I made myself come here.”

“Made yourself?”

Kenobi smiled again, the same queasy one. “This is the first I’ve been out of our quarters alone. Meeting you today.”

Bruck struggled to keep his expression neutral, to not show how that confession had made his own heart jump in fear. He hadn’t realized Ben was that fragile. “Congratulations.” He put down his utensils, pushed his tray away, and reached across the table, closing his hands around Kenobi’s as they curled around the cup. “Ben, did she get in your head? She tried to get into mine.”

Kenobi’s hands flexed beneath his. “Not literally. Not that way. She mind-fucked me, but not like that. My shields—I think the bond helped somehow. What she did was bad enough.”

“Of course it was. I just thought maybe—”

“It’s been bad,” Kenobi admitted. “But that’s not why. It was . . .” Then he fell silent.

“Look, Ben, you don’t have to tell me anything unless you want to.”

Kenobi took his hands away and pressed the heels of them to his forehead hard enough to for the mesh to leave a mark. “It’s not that,” he said quietly. “I have to talk about it all for the Senate subcommittee anyway. I’d better get used to telling the whole story in public.” He fell silent again and Bruck just sat quietly with his hands around his own cup, waiting. Finally, Kenobi took a deep breath, let it out, and looked up again at Bruck, eyes glittering fiercely. “Listen, Bruck: that tracking device—”

“It was supposed to fail. Andreth told me later. Did you know before?”

Kenobi nodded. “You were right about this mission. I should never have accepted it. I shouldn’t have let them use me like this. Not even for your—”

“Not even for my trials,” Bruck agreed and looked away. “I don’t feel real good about earning my ‘saber with your blood either. It would be different if it didn’t feel so much like a set-up.”

Kenobi snorted. “Only because it was. That’s what your trials are, if they’re not like mine and just happen because you stumble into some situation that allows you to distinguish yourself.”

Neither of them spoke for a time. They sat quietly, not looking at each other, each nursing their own thoughts and cold cups of tea.

“Thanks,” Kenobi said finally.

“For what?” Bruck responded, mystified.

“For letting me say that. For not telling me what a hard life it is, like Qui would have. He’s so damned stoic sometimes. For all his defying the Council, he just takes whatever he’s handed in the end.”

“Nobody should have to go through that, Ben. Whether you volunteered or not.”

“Did I ever say thanks for getting my ass out of there?”

“No.” Bruck grinned. “Ungrateful jerk. I just wish we’d found you sooner.”

“Me, too,” Ben said quietly and looked away.

Bruck sat turning over in his mind the fact of this strangely subdued man Kenobi had become, and finding it made him both sad and angry. “Ben, if that’s what you want. If there’s anything I can do, if you need anything—”

Kenobi smiled tentatively and got to his feet. “I know. Thanks. I already owe you.”

Bruck shook his head. “For what? Volunteering to be part of my trials? I don’t think so.”

“For doing what I couldn’t. For bringing her in.” He paused a moment, in the act of getting up to go, and looked at Bruck. “Can I ask you one more favor?”

“Sure.”

“Walk back with me?”

 

They left the refectory in silence after Bruck had bussed his tray and Ben’s cup. The first of the dinner rush was just coming in and he watched Ben as they threaded their way through the growing trickle of hungry Jedi. He’d always liked watching Kenobi walk through a crowd. He moved with a smooth grace that made it seem as though his hips were on bearings, and gave him a damn fine walk-away. Today he seemed awkward, though it took a moment to figure out why: he was trying to avoid being touched. It wasn’t just that he was protecting his hands, though he was. He seemed to want to avoid any contact at all, right down to the brush of cloth against his own cloak, which he hugged closely around himself.

They had walked through these halls together any number of times in the years past, but this time it felt different. At other times, they had held hands, or Bruck had walked with his arm over Kenobi’s shoulder, Kenobi with his arm around Bruck’s waist. They’d walked side-by-side without touching, or touching only to shove each other playfully, or feel each other up, or to lay a hand on the other’s back in comfort. Bruck wanted to do that now but he could sense Ben didn’t want it—or rather that he wouldn’t welcome it. Bruck suspected Kenobi wanted it more than he would allow himself.

Bruck finally gave in to the impulse when they were alone in the lift. As it rose through the residential floors, he smoothed his palm gently down Ben’s spine and was surprised by the start and shudder it elicited.

He knew almost instantly something was wrong, even before Ben’s muscles locked under his hand. An instant later Kenobi had jammed himself into a corner of the lift and was staring at Bruck with wild and white-ringed eyes. _Flashback. He’s having a flashback_ , Bruck realized, and lunged for the emergency stop button on the lift. Kenobi cringed, whimpering in a way that made Bruck sick to hear it. Sith knew where he thought he was or who he thought Bruck was or what he thought was happening.

“It was an accident,” Kenobi gasped. “Please, don’t. Please. Let me go.” He slid slowly down the wall, curling up, and Bruck followed, kneeling on the floor within touching distance but carefully keeping his hands to himself.

“Ben, it’s all right. It’s Bruck. It’s just me, B-Boy. C’mon, you’re okay. She’s the one in a cell, not you. You’re safe now.” He kept his tone soothing and voice quiet, inching forward almost imperceptibly as Ben’s gaze darted around the tiny room, his breathing harsh and loud. “It’s just the lift, Ben. It’s all right. You’re at temple now, on your way back to your quarters.” But nothing he could say would calm Kenobi. Finally, Bruck commed Qui-Gon, pulling him from class to meet them at the vestibule to their quarters’ floor. Ben shivered like a wet animal in a cold wind, begging “don’t, don’t, don’t,” as they waited for Qui-Gon to tell them he’d arrived. He cried out when Bruck set the little room moving again, overriding the other calls. When the doors opened once more, both Qui-Gon and Tianna were there.

Bruck eased his way out past Tianna as she slipped inside the lift, and saw to his annoyance that a crowd was gathering.

“This one’s out of service. Please use the bank at the other end,” he said shooing curious neighbors along. “Bunch of gossipy mynocks. You’d think Jedi wouldn’t gawk,” he muttered under his breath. “Nothing to see, people. Just a malfunction.” Ben wouldn’t want anyone to see him like this, Bruck knew. He’d be mortified enough at his audience of three.

By the time he’d herded away the crowd, Tianna and Qui-Gon were bringing a dazed and shaky Kenobi out of the lift. “Ben?” Bruck said gently.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, face flushing as he looked away.

“No, Ben. She should be sorry. Not you.” But Kenobi just turned away from him.

Bruck walked along with them, bringing up the rear as they headed toward the Jinn-Kenobi quarters. Qui-Gon’s arm was firmly around Ben’s shoulders, enveloping him in his cloak. Tianna walked beside him, one hand on his forearm. Bruck hung back, a little afraid to touch him again.

Once inside, Qui-Gon led him to the bedroom and Tianna dropped back to wait with Bruck. “What happened?” she asked. Bruck told her, Tianna shaking her head with a sour expression on her face. “I knew he wasn’t ready for that, but I couldn’t stop him. I don’t imagine you could either.”

“No, but I probably could have tried harder.”

“How could you know what kind of shape he was in? Don’t blame yourself, Bruck. It wasn’t anything you did or didn’t do. He’s just not ready. And this was his choice.”

“The hearing’s coming up soon, isn’t it?”

Tianna nodded. “It may have to be put off though. Or they may have to just take his report. It’s going to be a while before he’s really ready to face her, or talk about this to complete strangers. If he ever is.”

 

Almost a half hour later, Qui-Gon emerged from the bedroom looking drawn. “He wants to see you,” he said to Bruck.

“Is he all right?”

“No,” Qui-Gon replied, sitting down heavily on the sofa beside Bruck. “He hasn’t been all right since you brought him back from that hellhole. I can’t even really say he’s better than he was. Not after this. I wish he’d told me he was going to meet you.”

“I wish he had, too.”

They both looked up at Tianna, whose mouth was pressed into a thin line. “He asked me not to.”

Qui-Gon sighed. “I understand. Go,” he said, touching Bruck’s knee. “Before he falls asleep.”

Bruck thought Ben already had when he came through the door. Kenobi was lying curled around a pillow in a corner of the large bed, nearly invisible as anything but a lump beneath the covers. When he reached the side of the bed, Bruck leaned over and planted a light kiss on his temple and watched his eyelids flutter open again. He looked utterly drained now, skin nearly transparent, his eyes almost as bruised as Bruck’s. A flare of rage at the woman in the cells below filled Bruck for a moment, until Ben looked up at him. “Don’t,” he whispered. “Please. It’s like being flayed again.”

Bruck stared, surprised, and pulled his shields tighter. “You can feel that much of my emotions?”

“You weren’t exactly shielding them, you know,” Ben murmured, looking away. “And I’m still a bit raw.”

“Sorry.”

“No. My turn for that. You shouldn’t have had to see—”

“Don’t be stupid, Ben.” He sat down gingerly on the side of the bed and touched Kenobi’s hair. “Don’t let her make you feel like you’re something less than you are.”

Kenobi closed his eyes.

“What’s wrong?” Bruck said gently.

He seemed to be struggling with the answer, though Bruck could almost sense it at the surface of his thoughts; it was more emotion than words.

“I am,” he said finally in a voice so quiet Bruck could barely hear him. “Or the Council is.”

Bruck didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what Ben meant, it was that he knew too well.

He stood up and toed off his boots, setting them at the end of the bed beside the bench where he also laid his cloak. His stola and outer tunic followed. He lifted the covers away and slid in beside Ben carefully, minding his hands, and pulled the covers back over both of them. They shifted a little, Ben moving back toward the center to give him more room, then molding himself closer against him when he’d settled. Bruck’s arms went around his waist and neck, one arm curling around to cradle his head. Ben rested his forehead against Bruck’s and sighed, tangling their feet together. “Go to sleep, Ben,” Bruck murmured and kissed his cheek. “I’ll be here for a while this time, no matter what the Council wants.”

 

* * *

 

Obi-Wan woke in the middle of the night, panting and shuddering but not remembering what had woken him, and not quite sure of where he was for a moment. Then Qui-Gon nestled a little closer behind him, nuzzling his hair and pulling him tighter. “Shhhhh, _kosai_. It’s all right,” he murmured. He started as another hand stroked his cheek, then realized it was Bruck, who kissed his forehead. “Go back to sleep,” B-Boy murmured and moved closer too. Sometime in the night Bruck had stripped down to his small clothes, apparently still a bit shy of being entirely naked in the same bed with Qui-Gon. That made Obi-Wan smile a little. The bed, fortunately, was big enough for all of them, so it was cozy but not crowded, giving them all enough room to move.

Another time and other circumstances would have made the situation almost too erotic to bear. Now, it just provided a deeper comfort and sense of safety than he’d felt in a long time. The warmth and the scent of sleep and skin made him drowsy and he burrowed into it like an animal settling in to hibernate. Bruck nuzzled against him and he felt Qui-Gon’s arm move around both of them, taking Bruck in as well and pulling them both closer. He drifted off once more, still smiling, and slept peacefully the rest of the night.

 

* * *

 

It was less awkward than it might have been when morning found them. Qui-Gon, unsurprisingly, woke first, but lay still against Obi-Wan’s back, breathing quietly until Obi-Wan sensed his wakefulness through the bond and slowly came awake as well. Qui-Gon rubbed his cheek against the back of Obi-Wan’s head and sighed quietly. “Good morning, _kosai_ ,” he whispered. Bruck made some semi-conscious noise, groped for Obi-Wan with his eyes still closed, and found Qui-Gon instead, who chuckled. Obi-Wan watched Bruck’s eyes fly open and couldn’t help laughing too.

“The look on your face,” Obi-Wan murmured, kissing him. “Thanks for staying last night.”

Bruck returned the kiss a little tentatively, as though afraid of offending Qui-Gon, who hadn’t moved from Obi-Wan’s back. The older man rolled over now and threw off the covers, then got up and slipped on his robe.

“You two go back to sleep. It’s early yet for the likes of you.”

“All right,” Obi-Wan agreed, yawning.

Bruck squirmed in Obi-Wan’s arms as though he were going to follow. “I should go.”

“It’s all right. Qui doesn’t mind,” Obi-Wan murmured, snuggling closer and closing his eyes. “Stay. Please. He likes his early mornings to himself, anyway.”

After a tense moment, Bruck relaxed and nuzzled against him. “If you say so,” he replied.

But neither of them went back sleep. Obi-Wan let himself bask in Bruck’s warmth, in the pleasure of lying in bed together as they had not in a long while, and pondered what was so different about it than lying in bed with Qui. For one thing, they hadn’t been in this bed together before. Normally, that would have added a little spice to the situation, but his libido was AWOL currently and that didn’t seem to matter. He finally decided it had something to do with the fact that Bruck wasn’t protecting him they way Qui-Gon was, just commiserating. It was disconcerting to discover that, at least for the moment, he felt closer to Bruck.

Bruck tightened his arms around him, as though sensing what he was thinking, and kissed his forehead. “Damn, this is a big bed,” he muttered. “I don’t suppose I could get one of these now.”

“I think this is the deluxe master’s issue,” Obi-Wan replied in a mock serious tone. “What _are_ you doing for quarters now? I assume you’ve moved out of Andreth’s.” It was a relief to talk about something so normal.

“Yeah, I threw some stuff in a vacant single and had the Quarternmaster move the rest while I was gone. At least the bed doesn’t take up the whole room now, like it did in that padawan closet. It’s missing your decorator touches though. Everything’s still in containers. Want to help me unpack this afternoon?”

“I can’t,” he said with a shudder. _I’d have to leave here_.

“I’ll be with you,” Bruck coaxed, instinctively sensing the source of his fear. “Don’t let her win, Ben.”

“I can’t.” He could feel the panic growing. Suddenly, he wanted to stay in bed all day, with the covers over his head.

“Yes, you can,” Bruck insisted, holding tighter. “We’ll have firstmeal, I’ll walk you down to see Tianna and then to PT, we’ll go eat midmeal afterwards, or go running and then eat, and then we’ll go to my new quarters and you can spiff it up, and I’ll walk you back here afterwards, or we’ll meet Qui-Gon in the refectory, when he’s done with classes.”

Obi-Wan’s heart sounded loud in his ears. Bruck let the silence build around them until he couldn’t bear it anymore. Bruck was right. She was winning. Obi-Wan took a deep breath, trying to slow his heart.

“You’ll have to do the moving.”

“What, are you crippled or something? Use the Force, Knight Kenobi. I’m not doing all the heavy lifting. What do you think I’m bringing you along for?”

“Well, we’d better fortify ourselves first. C’mon. You can help me get dressed for a change and relieve Qui of the tedium.”

 

By the end of the day, Obi-Wan was quivering wreck.

Bruck had been with him all day as they went through the tasks he’d outlined that morning. It had been harder than he’d imagined anything could be to walk out the door that morning, even with Bruck on one side and Qui-Gon on the other. Every unexpected sound made him start, every abrupt motion set his heart racing. His meeting with Tianna seemed to accomplish as little as the previous ones had. Bruck nearly had to drag him to physical therapy, and it took all his coaxing to get him to eat at midday. Afterwards, all he wanted to do was lie on Bruck’s bed and doze while the new knight unpacked. Bruck worked at engaging him, but Obi-Wan couldn’t make himself care. By the time lastmeal arrived, there was no question of meeting Qui-Gon in the refectory. Instead, he walked back to his quarters between the two of them.

“Do you want me to stay again tonight?” Bruck offered, touching his arm.

Obi-Wan shook his head. “No, it’s all right. You’ve babysat me enough today,” he said in a bitter tone. “Let Qui take over now.”

“Ben, don’t—”

“It’s all right. Really. Go find Isa.”

Bruck left him reluctantly. Qui-Gon set their dinner on the small table and pulled Obi-Wan’s chair out for him, then sat down across from him. Obi-Wan pushed his food around for a while, awkwardly managing a few mouthfuls with his splinted hands, then gave up and pushed the plate aside.

“I can’t take this any more, Qui,” he said, looking down at his hands in his lap. “I can’t live like this.” His voice was full of exhaustion and frustration and tinged with anger.

“Your hands are healing—”

“It’s not my hands. It’s being afraid to leave these rooms. It’s the flashbacks. It’s not sleeping at night and sleeping too much during the day. It’s the fear I can’t live with.”

“What are you afraid of?” Qui-Gon asked him gently.

“I don’t know. There’s so much I’ve blocked out. I still don’t really remember much after she got to work on me. I don’t want to.”

“Of course not—”

“But there’s something . . . just . . . I can’t get at it, by myself or with Ti. I think I have to.”

“Can I help?” Qui-Gon asked.

Obi-Wan looked up, hope and desperation and despair mingling on his face. “I hope so.”

 

They knelt together in the fading sunlight near the doors to their small balcony, or Qui-Gon knelt and Obi-Wan sat between the larger man’s knees. The last time they’d used this posture, Obi-Wan had been much younger and smaller, just learning to truly focus on the Living Force. Qui-Gon had guided him gently into it until he’d been immersed for the first time in the way he usually was in the Unifying Force. It had opened up a whole new world for him, vast and full of life, and shimmering with joy, and that joy had shone on his face and filled their bond.

Qui-Gon rested his hands on Obi-Wan’s shoulders and kissed the top of his head, remembering. He’d been so young and eager then, and so determined to prove himself, as he had, many times over in the years that followed. Now his shoulders were hunched beneath Qui-Gon’s hands, as though the weight were too much to bear. “I love you,” he murmured into the shaggy red-gold mop. Obi-Wan leaned back against him with a little sigh. “Ready?” Qui-Gon asked.

“As much as I’ll ever be,” he replied, sounding doubtful.

“Then let’s begin.”

Qui-Gon closed his eyes and let himself drift. Finding his center even after a lifetime of meditation was still easier at some times than others. Sitting here with Obi-Wan between his knees and his warm back pressed against Qui-Gon’s belly and groin would have been distracting at another time. But there was so much pain radiating from him now that Qui-Gon was more distracted by that than by his lover’s physical presence. Through their bond, which was wide open, he could feel Obi-Wan’s hands throbbing and wondered briefly how he could stand it. He’d stopped wearing the pain patches during the day, ostensibly because they made him feel “fuzzy” but Qui-Gon knew it was because he feared more flashbacks. After yesterday, Qui-Gon wasn’t sure that made a difference.

Along with the pain, Obi-Wan radiated an unfamiliar sense of disquiet and an abnormal amount of fear, so the first thing Qui-Gon did was push his own sense of peace and calm into their bond, hoping Obi-Wan would open himself to it. Strangely enough, this was the first time they’d attempted a joint meditation since the formation of this new bond on Naboo. It was the first time, really, that they’d had much time at all to explore it, with Obi-Wan’s nearly back-to-back missions and his own teaching schedule—not to mention his own missions. So despite the circumstances, Qui-Gon felt this time with Obi-Wan was something of a gift. He pushed that into their bond too.

A spike of anger stabbed through it in return, nearly knocking Qui-Gon out of the light trance he’d fallen into. He felt Obi-Wan struggling to release that emotion into the Force and succeeding after a time. Slowly and with much more difficulty, he settled into his own trance, his breathing slow and steady but his shoulders still tense beneath Qui-Gon’s hands.

He let them drift for a time until there was only their slow and steady breathing, nearly in sync, and then matched his own to Obi-Wan’s and reached out through the bond, focusing on the tension in his shoulders. He imagined the muscles loosening there, and after a time, they did, the suggestion filling Obi-Wan’s consciousness. It was the most relaxed he’d been since before the last mission and Qui-Gon hoped that was a good sign. He let them drift for a little more time, not directing their thoughts anywhere, just letting them both bask in the peace. Obi-Wan seemed content to stay there and probably would have without some urging. But that wouldn’t accomplish their goal.

 _Show me the cell_ , he thought, concentrating on the desire rather than the words. They’d lost the ability to hear each other’s thoughts when the bond had changed, but the trade-off had been an ability to sense each other’s feelings at a deeper level. It made it more difficult to communicate directly in meditation but Obi-Wan seemed to sense what he wanted.

The spike of fear he’d expected was there and he gentled Obi-Wan through it, enveloping him in love and a sense of security. The younger man shivered a little, his uneasiness souring the bond but also filling it with a sense of determination. And suddenly Qui-Gon found himself in a cold, bare, metallic room, hands and ankles manacled from the floor and ceiling without a strip of clothing in between. Immediately, the bond was flooded with a bitter, intense anxiety, one Qui-Gon could sympathize with all too easily. Then he seemed to step back from the scene, watching from somewhere outside.

Had it been Suri, or even himself, he thought Obi-Wan would have found the setup amusing and highly enjoyable; it was jut the kind of “scene” that turned him on. And perhaps that was part of the problem: his own fantasy life had turned against him.

He waited while Obi-Wan turned that idea over in his mind and both of them felt the rightness to that conclusion. _What’s the first thing she did?_ Qui-Gon pushed gently, but that seemed too complex to communicate this way. Perhaps curiosity and encouragement. _Show me._

_She walked around his suspended body, fingers trailing along his skin teasingly, nails scratching lightly, until she stopped behind him. There was a pause then when she took her hands away, and then her small, sharp fingertips traced the glyphs on his back. Unless, by some highly unlikely chance, she read Old High Danjii, they would be incomprehensible to her. And they were. But Qui-Gon’s monogram in Basic was not. She traced that too, then pressed herself against his back, her hands running over him as intimately as a lover’s. She had to stretch a little to reach his ear. What do these mean? she whispered. They’re very sexy._

Beneath his hands, Obi-Wan shuddered again and he sent warmth and peace through the bond.

_I don’t recognize this script, but it’s not Isani, or any of its dialects. You’re not what you’d like us to think, are you? The tracking device, these marks on you. You’re not Isani. Let’s find out what you are. Underneath._

The memory stuttered there, like an ancient flatfilm. Qui-Gon urged him gently to focus, sensing the hidden presence of what Obi-Wan felt he was missing.

_She was behind him again, fingers tracing the characters for serenity and passion. This must have hurt, she observed. Was it an initiation? Do you belong to some society? Were you conscious when it was done? Did you cry out? Did you sweat? Did you bleed?_

_Did you like it?_

He heard Obi-Wan whimper and pushed calm and a sense of security through the bond.

_Let’s scan these and see what we can find out about your glyphs._

Another skip, this one in time rather than in focus.

_Passion. Serenity. In Old Danjii. How fascinating. How does it go, that little Jedi screed? Is that what you are? And this, whose initials are these? QJG. Or is it QGJ_

Without warning, Obi-Wan was screaming again, phantom pain stabbing through the bond to find Qui-Gon, settling not in his hands, as he’d expected, but in his groin. It felt as though someone had squeezed his testicles hard enough to bruise.

“No! Not there! Please! No!” Obi-Wan sobbed, bent over between Qui-Gon’s knees. “I didn’t know! I didn’t know!” Shields slammed down between them and Obi-Wan was alone in his own head again, meditative trance shattered.

Qui-Gon curled over him protectively, struggling to get his arms around Obi-Wan’s waist, the residual phantom pain still throbbing in his groin. He pushed it away. “Hush, love, hush. It’s over. You’re safe now. It’s over.” Beneath him, Obi-Wan started to retch and struggled to get up. Qui-Gon pulled him to his feet and steered him in the direction of the fresher. They just barely made it before what little Obi-Wan had eaten reappeared in an insistent manner. He struggled out of Qui-Gon’s arms and retched over the commode dryly for several more minutes before letting it flush and sinking onto the floor with his back against the shower stall, pale and sweating and gulping air.

“Oh gods,” he moaned quietly, elbows resting on his knees, hands dangling. “Oh gods.”

Qui-Gon touched his shoulder tentatively but Obi-Wan shook him off. He sat, breathing heavily, in what Qui-Gon felt bordered on shock, and in a few moments he was shivering. Instead of trying to move him, Qui-Gon fetched the throw from their sofa and wrapped it around Obi-Wan’s shoulders. He was allowed to do that much, at least before Obi-Wan withdrew from him again. So he sat on the tile floor against the wall where he could see Obi-Wan’s face, watching patiently.

The silence stretched on for quite a long time. Obi-Wan’s breathing gradually slowed and some color came back to him, but he didn’t move and didn’t seem inclined to, or to speak, anytime soon.

“She knew, then.” Qui-Gon said finally, hoping to prime the pump. “She knew you were a Jedi. Or at least suspected it.”

Obi-Wan nodded almost automatically, not really listening, it appeared.

“Did she actually cut you?”

That made him look up. “What?” he responded in a dazed voice.

“Did she cut your genitals? Or just threaten to castrate you?”

“She wasn’t going to castrate me,” he said faintly, in a voice without any emotion. “Not in the usual way.”

“What did she say?”

He struggled to collect himself for a moment, then finally responded in an almost inaudible voice. “She gave me a choice: my cock or my hands. She’d leave me my balls, so I’d still have the drive. But we wouldn’t be able to fuck. I told her my hands. And that was wrong, Qui. It was wrong.” His eyes filled with tears.

“Why was that wrong, _kosai_?” Qui-Gon said in terribly gentle voice.

“Because, because I’m a Jedi—first,” he gasped, “and your lover—last.”

And now it was Qui-Gon who felt ill. He sat frozen, horrified that his own words had put Obi-Wan in such a position, and that the pictograms that symbolized their devotion to each other and the order had betrayed him. Then he realized he was making the same mistake Obi-Wan had. He got up on his knees on the hard tile and shuffled across the short space that separated them. His hands cupped Obi-Wan’s where they hung between his knees and he brought them up enough to bend his face to them and kiss the palms over the mesh encasing them. “You should never have had to make that choice in that way.”

“What’s the difference, Qui?” he snarled, jerking his hands away. “What’s the difference if I have to make the choice between you and my duty when I’m being tortured or in the field? What’s the difference?”

“Because this was no choice, love. Do you really think she would have let you live if Bruck and Garen hadn’t gotten you out? What the agency is doing is illegal and you had evidence of it. She was toying with you. She was fairly certain you had a lover—”

“She knew who I was!” Obi-Wan shouted, his voice echoing like thunder in the small tiled room. “She knew the minute she saw my back! Everybody in the Agency apparently knows those fucking pictograms after my pain trials. She knew I was the padawan who’d killed an agent. She was making me _pay_.”

There weren’t many times that Qui-Gon found himself stunned into silence, but this was one of them. Obi-Wan glared at him from under a fringe of hair for what seemed an interminable time and then dropped his head. After a moment, his shoulders began to shake. His head came up again and banged the plass panel of the shower, making Qui-Gon wince in sympathy. But Obi-Wan was laughing, tears streaming down his face.

“I knew that would come back to bite me some day. I just—I didn’t think—it would be like this.”

“Little gods,” Qui-Gon muttered. “ _Kosai_ —” He reached out, leaning forward and watched in shock as Obi-Wan recoiled from him.

“Don’t. Just don’t. I—No!” He scrambled to his feet and stumbled out of the little room. A moment later the door to their quarters opened and closed.

Qui-Gon sank back on his heels, inwardly reeling, outwardly impassive. The bond Obi-Wan had forged between them snapped off like a light.


	3. Ashes

He’d lost his boots somewhere, if he’d ever put them on, but he still had his cloak, though there was no warmth left in it, even with the hood pulled up. He’d been walking for hours and he was footsore and weary, his mind an unquiet turmoil of emotions he could not quell or release to the Force. He’d wandered far from home into an area that was only vaguely familiar, somewhere in the lower levels, though he was only peripherally aware of his surroundings. Wherever he was, there was no one else here, which was just as well. His head was pounding and he couldn’t think, didn’t wish to think, to speak, to have any interaction with anyone, least of all Qui-Gon. Because Qui-Gon was the crux of what had driven him out of the rooms he’d called home for more than half his life, and there was no peace to be found there now.

So he walked.

Around him now was a long and ancient stone-lined corridor that looked as though it should have been lit by torches rather than the soft ambient light that filled it. The floor beneath his bare feet was worn smooth and grooved in the middle with the passage of thousands of others over thousands of years, something that was somehow a comfort. It was like following an old riverbed in a dry season, knowing it still sustained life at other times. He walked with his head down, eyes on the floor, seeing nothing but the stones beneath his feet.

At least that was what the light reflected into his eyes. There it stopped, the signals from his optic nerves forming images in his brain that carried no meaning whatsoever. The only awareness he possessed was of pain—the physical pain in his hands, and the ache in his chest that was heartsickness—which had filled him the way water fills a glass. It spread through him, reducing his world to the size and shape of his own body. It was a wonder he sensed the end of the corridor before running into it.

But he did sense it, and looked up into a dark metal mirror a few steps away, seeing a barefoot and disheveled figure reflected there, shadowed eyes gleaming in the recesses of its hood. He was at the portal to the Hall of the Heroes. Force, what impulse had brought him here again? He had come here once before, for the vigil before his knighting. It had not been a pleasant experience.

As he looked, another figure appeared in the mirror, a bent old man with a cane wearing long robes, who stopped just behind him but remained silent. For a few moments, they gazed at each other in the dark surface until Obi-Wan turned around, intending to go back the way he’d come. But the old man was blocking his way.

“What do you seek here, Ben-Zhao Lars of Dannora, third Padawan of Master Qui-Gon Jinn, First Son of House Kenobi and ninetieth scion to bear the name of Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi?” the old Jedi said. This was the Kirtan, the keeper of the Hall, who knew by sight, or seemed to know, everyone living in temple and the long dead as well.

“Nothing, My Master,” Obi-Wan murmured, turning again—to find his way still, impossibly, blocked.

“What purpose have you here?” the Kirtan repeated. “No one comes here without a reason, Knight Kenobi.”

“I—I was wandering, Master. Just walking. Not paying attention.”

“Lost.”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan whispered.

“You come dressed as a _hinrei_.” A ritual seeker, a pilgrim. Barefoot, cloaked, weaponless.

“A, a mistake, Master. In my haste—”

“No mistake. Your feet brought you here.”

“Yes,” he replied, almost voiceless.

“Then come.” The old Jedi gestured toward the door with his cane and the portal split in two, opening inward on a vast darkness. Obi-Wan knew there was a stairway there that led down into the root of the Temple, to the surface of Coruscant, and a well of still-sweet water that was also a powerful wellspring of the Force. Millennia ago, this had been called the Wellspring Temple, the Mother House of all the Jedi. But he could see nothing but darkness. “Come,” the Kirtan said again, taking Obi-Wan’s elbow and ushering him forward, into the shadows.

 

* * *

 

Qui-Gon knew better than to go after him. Like other battles Obi-Wan had fought with himself, this one would have to be won on his own terms, with his own weapons and skills and intellect. But it was a hard wait. And an interminable one, especially without the bond.

It hadn’t just been dampened this time, but closed, the way Qui-Gon had once closed their training bond when they had first become lovers. For the first time in many years, they were once again two separate people. Qui-Gon found he did not like being quite so alone anymore, though there had been a time when he had craved this kind of solitude, after Xanatos’s turning. Flayed by his own conscience, he had not been able to bear anything approaching intimacy then, certainly not the intimacy of a bond. So he understood Obi-Wan’s need for solitude, though perhaps not its cause.

He settled himself in his usual chair and went back to grading exams. It was soothing work in some ways, requiring just enough concentration to keep him occupied while leaving him alert enough to sense any change. It was long after midwatch by the time he finished, his eyes grainy with staring at his datapad’s screen. And there was still no sign of Obi-Wan. No glimmer of his presence, no sound at the door. He had, by now, been gone for hours. Qui-Gon was starting to worry.

Sleep seemed unlikely, if not impossible, so he busied himself with making tea and finding a snack then consumed them, letting his mind drift. He wondered if he should alert Tianna to what had gone on this evening, and then wondered what he would say, beyond that Obi-Wan had begun to remember everything. That it had left them both deeply disturbed. That the young man was gone and Qui-Gon did not know where to find him.

Well.

The hour was late enough that Obi-Wan’s absence was becoming worrisome, if not alarming. There was no guarantee that he had not left the Temple, though it seemed unlikely any of the porters would have let him go barefoot and as clearly distressed as he was. But it was a vast complex, and padawans on curfew had been sneaking out of it for generations. If he were truly determined to leave, there would be very little to stop him.

But for some reason, Qui-Gon did not think he had. If meditation was the core of a Jedi’s serenity, Obi-Wan had always found the most peace in the active kind. Never good at being still, even in sleep, only the movement of his body seemed to quiet his mind. He found peace and his center in katas, in the scholar’s garden raking gravel, pacing the Temple’s labyrinthine halls undisturbed in cloak and hood, not in the statuary stillness Qui-Gon knelt in once or twice a day. Agitation invariably drove Obi-Wan to his feet to reach for saber or rake or garden hoe or kitchen knife. And when those were denied him, he walked, sometimes for hours, as he had, perhaps, tonight.

Qui-Gon found himself growing drowsy at last and stretched out on the sofa to wait for whatever might come: sleep, or the footfalls of his beloved returning.

 

* * *

 

They went down into the darkness. The last time, Obi-Wan had summoned Forcelight to illuminate his way; this time he descended the stairs behind the Kirtan with only sound and Force sense to guide his way. The last time, the darkness had been like warm velvet around him; tonight it was dank and cold and had there been light, he knew he would see his breath streaming behind him. The last time, he had been told to bring with him only what he needed; this time he came with nothing—and too much.

The stairwell was truly that: a well lined with a helical course of nearly unbroken steps. Now and then a landing flattened out where he knew another level of the temple had been added to an old one, reaching into the sky with the rest of Coruscant, but they were few and far between. Had he been able to trail his fingertips along the wall, he knew he would have found the textures of sculptures, bas relief, mosaic, or smooth expanses of fresco, depicting long-dead and noteworthy Jedi, his own ancestor included. Somewhere.

Here.

Obi-Wan stopped at the same time the Kirtan did, in the utter darkness, without a signal between them, as though this had been their goal—his goal—all along. Then light flared from the Kirtan’s staff. (And when had it become not a cane, but a staff?) The face before him in the metallic bas relief was little like his own, and bore a great drooping mustache tied off on either side with beads. His ancestor’s hair was pulled back in a thick and elaborately folded topknot, something vaguely similar to how Qui-Gon wore his hair.

But this man had nothing to do with Qui-Gon Jinn or his family. The plaque at the figure’s feet spelled that out.

####  _Obi-Wan Kenobi_  
Seer, mystic, scholar, warrior  
Scion of House Kenobi, Dannora  
Master to Sakiri Diros and Lisanda Redelion  
Defender of the Republic and the Jedi during the Great Schism  
Martyred in the Battle of Korriban  
His ashes are interred here

Obi-Wan sank down on the steps at his ancestor’s feet, the Kirtan beside him. There were 88 Jedi, knights and masters, between him and this man, and almost 10,000 years of time. He wondered what his namesake had been like.

“Do you know how to read this epitaph?” the Kirtan asked him.

“The Basic isn’t that much changed, Master—”

The Kirtan waved a hand. “It’s not the language I’m speaking of. Every art has its hidden meanings, its embedded code, youngling. Especially commemorative art. Listen.” He tapped the plaque. Obi-Wan heard the hollowness behind it. “The order of his achievements is very important here because it tells you not only who this Master was, but also what his peers thought of him, what was important to the Council in those days, and what they desired we remember of him. This is not just a commemoration, but a lesson, a reminder. A message. Do you see?”

“Yes, Master,” Obi-Wan replied, feeling slightly dazed and rather like a padawan again, trying to concentrate through the throbbing of his hands. He couldn’t remember when he’d last taken anything for the pain.

“Good. Now pay attention. First, we learn his name, one you share. Then we learn how he perceived himself and was perceived by others: seer, mystic, scholar, warrior.”

“How—how do we know this was his perception of himself, if the Council composed this?” Obi-Wan was surprised he got the question out, that it had even formed in his fuddled head.

“Someone close to him would have written this, and he was a member of the Council at the time of his death. He would have had friends and colleagues there who knew him well and mourned him.”

“I see.” A Councillor too. He hadn’t known that. This was quite some legacy to live up to.

“No, not yet. But you will,” the Kirtan answered. “If you pay attention. Even the order in this line is important. Your ancestor was a prophet, Knight Kenobi, and not shy about it, not like our Master Yoda. No doubts, no questions, no ‘always in motion the future is’ for Master Kenobi.” The Kirtan tapped the scroll in the hand of the image, the one inscribed with the key words of the Chosen One prophecy. “He believed what the Force told him. Trusted it.”

That was certainly something to chew on. Master Yoda had taught him nothing but doubt and suspicion of his own talent, and Qui-Gon—well, his own Master was no believer in visions. Except the prophecy of the Chosen One.

“But he wasn’t the agent of that prophecy.”

“No, so why do you suppose he’s shown holding it?”

Obi-Wan thought for a time. It was slow going through the pounding in his head and hands. “The Great Schism. He was worried about the unity of the Jedi and balance of the Force.”

“Why would the Council want it there?”

“A reminder, as you said. That the Force hadn’t been balanced. That the Sith could come back. Was this put up after their defeat?”

“Before. Not long after Master Kenobi’s death.”

“Then it’s a warning, too.” A beacon in the darkness that was engulfing them, he thought, because they didn’t know if they would win.

The Kirtan nodded but said nothing, and Obi-Wan looked back up at the plaque. “Mystic and scholar. Those go hand in hand with seer,” Obi-Wan murmured.

“Yes,” the Kirtan agreed. “You will find a large body of philosophic work in the library by Master Kenobi on the nature of the Force—a holistic philosophy that’s not very popular these days.”

“Holistic in what sense, Master?”

“You know what Jocasta Nu would say to that question,” the Kirtan chided.

“Look it up,” they chorused together, Obi-Wan smiling for the first time in what seemed an eternity.

“I will,” Obi-Wan promised. And he would, he told himself.

“Good. And the last quality will not surprise you but it should.”

“‘Warrior’? Why should that surprise me?”

“Because this was a time of peace and the Jedi were not an order of warriors then. We were many things, but not fighters. But your ancestor—he was a fighter. One of his life-long interests was military history and strategy, and he was also trained in several Dannoran forms of combat himself.”

As if he had known what was coming. Perhaps he had. “Like the Houses of the Swords. That must have been very unpopular with his family.”

“Which brings us to the next line. Here, we learn where and who he came from: scion of House Kenobi, Dannora. What does that tell you?”

“Family connections. That mattered somehow. In a way they perhaps don’t today.”

The Kirtan nodded. “Good. Yes. Jedi were not taken so young from their families then. There were schools on many worlds where they could be trained as younglings and still live with their families, or at least be on the same planet or in the same system. Only later would they come here as padawans. Those blood connections were maintained during their lives, so the Jedi were not their only family. And after his family come his padawans.”

“His legacy.”

“Yes. Two Jedi who served the Order well during their lives, both masters in their turn. If you follow the master-padawan lines, you’ll find one of Master Kenobi’s line was master to Padawan Yoda and another master to Padawan Dooku—”

“—who both were master to Padawan Qui-Gon. Odd how intertwined we all are.”

“Not all of us, Knight Kenobi.” The Kirtan gave him a sharp look. “Your line and certain others.”

“Something else to look up?” he asked wryly.

The Kirtan tapped his knee. “Quick. Like your ancestor. That’s good. Now, the next two lines tell you why he’s here, but look how far down the list they are.”

“Almost an afterthought. Except . . . ”

“That one word. Martyred,” the Kirtan confirmed.

“Yes. It’s not used lightly.”

“Nor is it here. Do you know the story?”

“Not the details, no. Or at least not from this point of view. It’s in the family history. More a legend, really. He died a glorious death for the Republic, a true Jedi to the end. That sort of thing. Why ‘martyred’?”

“Because he died for what he believed in. He was captured by the Sith, and they tried to turn him. The choice they gave him was turn, or die. He chose death, unlike Exar Kun. They beheaded him.”

Obi-Wan touched the edges of the plaque, behind which Master Kenobi’s ashes lay, the sleeve of his robe falling away to reveal the splints on his fingers. “But he didn’t discorporate.”

“Not all do. No one has ever discovered why that is.”

“Who brought his body back to be Returned?”

“One of his children, who was with him.”

“His children? Was he bonded?”

“That surprises you? The order was very different then. None of this ‘no attachments’ nonsense. No hoary, sanctimonious, inflexible code about passion and serenity,” the Kirtan sniffed, sounding very much like Qui-Gon. “Of course he was bonded. He was a scion of House Kenobi. A first son, like you. And not disinherited, either, I might add. He was expected to marry well, and sire an heir, and he did. He married a young woman from another Dannoran Ruling House, whom he apparently loved very deeply, and they had two boys and a girl. Only the girl came to the Temple later. He didn’t live to see her knighted. She was still a padawan when she brought his body home.”

Obi-Wan was glad they were already sitting down or he’d have had to, quite suddenly. His head was reeling with the idea that it hadn’t always been this way in the order. He’d known that, intellectually, he supposed, but emotionally—this was what he’d grown up with: no passion, only serenity. No attachments. No family but the Jedi. He’d never been able to reconcile his feelings for Qui-Gon with those tenets, though Qui-Gon, independently minded rogue that he was, had no such qualms. To Qui-Gon, it was of the Force, of the Light, and therefore appropriate, whatever the Code said.

“His daughter brought him home,” Obi-Wan murmured.

“Yes. Poor child. It must have been very hard. She was just barely in her teens.”

“Did she—was she—after her knighting—”

Despite is inability to articulate his question, the Kirtan seemed to know what he was asking. “Was she bonded as well? Oh yes. And two of her children were Jedi too. We didn’t always steal babies to populate our ranks. We used to make our own.”

 _When did that stop?_ he wondered. _Why?_

“Something else to look up, young Kenobi,” the Kirtan said gently, touching the splints on his hand. He’d forgotten they hurt so rapt had he been in the conversation. “While you’ve still time.”

“Yes.” Obi-Wan looked over at the Kirtan, who wore a gentle but sad smile in the soft glow of his staff. “While there’s time.”

 

* * *

 

The sound of the door opening woke Qui-Gon, as he had known it would. There was a faint predawn light filling the windows and Obi-Wan stood outlined against it, looking down at him where he lay on the sofa.

“Did you sleep much?” Obi-Wan asked quietly. “You should have gone to bed.”

Qui-Gon sat up, scrubbing his face. “I wanted to be sure I heard you come in. Are you all right?”

Obi-Wan sat down beside him and took one of Qui-Gon’s big hands gingerly in his own. “I went to see the Kirtan.” Qui-Gon wasn’t sure what to make of that and said nothing. “Not intentionally. I wound up there, after walking around for hours in the lower levels in my bare feet and cloak.”

“Hmph. Like a _hinrei_. Foolish one,” Qui-Gon chided gently. He rubbed one foot against Obi-Wan’s icy ones.

“Yes, some poor, wandering, lost soul. The Kirtan was very kind. He must be used to befuddled Jedi wandering stupidly about at all hours, in need of guidance.”

“Did you find what you were seeking?”

“No,” Obi-Wan said slowly. “Not exactly. Although I’m still not sure what I was looking for. So perhaps I did. The Kirtan took me to visit my ancestor’s grave.”

“His grave? I knew there was a plaque—”

“His ashes are behind it. I should have had incense with me, and an offering, like we do at home.”

“I don’t think he’d mind that you came empty-handed, _kosai_.”

“No, probably not. He had children, Qui. Three of them. His daughter is the one who Returned him after he was murdered by the Sith.”

Qui-Gon wondered what his lover was getting at, or trying to get at. The bond was still closed between them and he had no sense but what he could see of what Obi-Wan was feeling or thinking. He seemed calmer now, and tired. In the faint light his eyes were shadowed, his features drawn. He pressed Qui-Gon’s hand lightly between his own and Qui-Gon curled his fingers carefully around one of them.

“If this happens again,” Obi-Wan said quietly, “you will take the sedatives you’re offered. Because I cannot go through this knowing they’re hurting you too. And you will not give whoever it is another lever to use against me. Agreed?”

Qui-Gon nodded.

“Promise me.”

“I swear to you, Knight Kenobi. I will not burden you again,” Qui-Gon replied in his most formal treaty-negotiator tones.

“That’s not what I asked, Qui-Gon Jinn,” Obi-Wan said with a sudden fierceness, glaring at him. “Swear you’ll let them sedate you. No ambiguous language. I’m not some backwater official to be maneuvered for his own good. Swear what I asked or swear nothing, damn you.”

Qui-Gon ducked his head in guilt, caught in his own deviousness. “I swear to you, Knight Kenobi, that should you be caught and tortured in the field, I will allow myself to be sedated—unless I feel it would jeopardize your life. That is a concession I will not make.”

Obi-Wan’s glare continued for a few more seconds, then collapsed into a weary sigh and a small, lopsided smile. “Better that than nothing from you, you old rogue. You’ll do as you see fit anyway, I suppose.”

The bond opened between them again and Qui-Gon drew the first deep and easy breath he had since it had pinched off hours before, then realized Obi-Wan was doing the same. They exchanged a knowing look and shared the quiet smile that went with it, Obi-Wan’s sad and chagrined, Qui-Gon’s merely relieved.

“Is that why you . . . bolted, shall we say? And closed the bond? Because you were afraid of hurting me?”

“Yes, and no,” Obi-Wan answered slowly. His words came out as though he were picking through bins full of scraps to find them. “This bond we’ve got, Qui—no one else has anything like this. Why us?”

“Does it matter? The Force made it—or you made it and the Force cooperated,” he shrugged. “That tells me there’s a reason for it, a reason we’re together. Whether it’s for some future purpose or merely a reward for the arduous life we lead doesn’t matter to me. And if that means that I share your pain literally instead of just empathetically, so be it. Having experienced both, I find there’s not much difference.”

“You’re mad, Qui-Gon. When you were hurt in that explosion hunting Xanatos—”

“You endured it, didn’t you? You let them sedate you and you were fine. I should have followed your example when this happened, since there was nothing I could do. I’m sorry. It’s when you’re hurt that I fall back into the role of being your master and wanting to protect you.”

Obi-Wan shook his head. “If that’s not attachment, I don’t know what is.”

“Ah. Is that the issue? Our attachment?”

“My fear of what being attached to you might make me do.”

“To save me, you mean. It’s a sensible fear to have. People do quite stupid things for love. That’s why the Code forbids attachments.”

“Yet here we are. Attached.”

“Yes, you might say at the hip, too.” Qui-Gon smiled. “ But the Code is not the Force. And it was not always this way. That makes Mace very nervous.”

“Does it? It makes me nervous, too.”

They sat in silence for a little while, hand in hand. “What did she say to you, love?” Qui-Gon asked finally, pushing the question forward as though it were a thermal detonator primed to go off. As it was.

Obi-Wan let it lie there for some time, sitting unusually still himself, afraid to set it off. “It’s not what she said, Qui. It’s what I—what she made me feel. About you. She said everything I expected her to: she called me your fucktoy, called you a pedophile, called the Jedi a nest of perverts. Nothing new. When that didn’t get any reaction, she started in on the Danjii and your monogram. Why had I let you mark me? Had I asked for it? Had you fucked me while you did it? Had I enjoyed it? And of course, you had and I had.”

“And you were ashamed?”

Obi-Wan shook his head. “Not . . . ashamed. Terminally embarrassed, as Bruck calls it, perhaps, but not ashamed. No, it was that she somehow managed to make what she was doing to me . . . your . . . fault. As if she wouldn’t have known who I was if you hadn’t marked me, which is true, or possibly true. But she made it seem as if her not knowing who I was would have made a difference. And I was just muddled and ill enough not to realize that it wouldn’t have made any difference at all. She would have hurt me in some other way, regardless, because that’s what she was hired by the Isani to do. But because she recognized me, she also did her best to poison me against you, not just hurt me physically. It was quite brilliantly done, really, in a horrifying way.”

“Little gods,” Qui-Gon murmured, pinching the bridge of his nose to ward off the nausea he was feeling. “So by the time she made you make that obscene choice between having your hands or your genitals mutilated—”

“I was cursing you. I hated you with every molecule in my body, every screaming nerve ending. And she was smiling. That smile, Qui. I still see that.” He exhaled heavily. “I ‘bolted’ as you say, before I started screaming again that I hate you.”

“And do you?”

Obi-Wan searched his face, lifted one hand in its splints to touch his cheek, then looked away again. “Some little irrational part of me does,” he replied with more candor than Qui-Gon expected. Or found that he wanted. “The part that’s still curled up in a ball whimpering in that cell. It’s going to take some time to get him out of there. I’m sorry, Qui.”

“Do you . . . want some time alone? Some space of your own? You’ve never had that.” Qui-Gon’s voice was steady and the tone neutral, but they were both very aware of the tension that filled him and the bond suddenly.

“I think it’s too late for that, Qui. I don’t know what I’d do with myself.”

“Perhaps that’s what you need to discover.”

Obi-Wan said nothing for a time, and sat very still, Qui-Gon’s hand still pressed between his own. “You’d let me go,” he said at last, “just like that.”

“If that’s what you wanted or needed? Yes. It would be hard and it would hurt. But I would let you go. I don’t own you. I never have. Is that what you want?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I want, except not to hurt you, and not to betray who and what I am. I don’t know if those two desires are compatible.”

“They may not always be, _kosai_. And for me to say that it would hurt more for you to not be true to yourself is disingenuous. But that’s the risk we take, loving another. It’s a risk I’m willing to take, but I’ve no right to demand the same risk of you. Would it help to have the marks removed?”

Obi-Wan let go of his hand and pressed the heels of his own to his eye sockets. “This is making my head hurt. I don’t know what I want, Qui. I’m so tired that I can’t think anymore. And I need a pain patch. Help me into bed, will you?”

 

* * *

 

Qui-Gon had gone to his afternoon classes by the time Obi-Wan woke again, but had thoughtfully cancelled his appointments for him. A message from Tianna was waiting for him with instructions to call when he was ready to see her again. He struggled gamely into his clothing by himself for the first time—not his full customary kit with belt and boots, but loose trousers with manageable fastenings, a civilian tunic that pulled over his head, and shoes that slipped on easily.

Once again, he ventured into the hallways alone, heading to the refectory to eat, and was relieved to find the nervousness and anxiety all but gone. There was still his report to compile, now that his memory was more complete and he started that after his meal. By the time Qui-Gon’s classes were over, he was nearly done.

Qui-Gon leaned down and kissed the top of his head, after shedding his boots and datapad. “Sleep well?”

“Yes, for the first time in too long,” he replied. “Though I’ve completely thrown off my internal clock now. The tea I made should still be hot, Qui, if you’d like some. And I’ll make dinner soon.”

“Thank you, love. I’ll get a cup,” Qui-Gon replied. He poured himself some of the slowly cooling liquid and made a fresh pot, then took himself off to the bedroom to leave Obi-Wan to his work. It couldn’t be an easy report to dictate, he knew, and less so with an audience. But the bond was quiescent and calm between him, so perhaps Obi-Wan was beginning to come to terms with what had been done to him—which was more than Qui-Gon felt he was going to be able to do.

He dallied in their room purposely, not wanting to hear the descriptions of what Obi-Wan had seen and endured more often than he had to. With the hearing coming up, he knew he would hear it then because he was not going to let Obi-Wan go alone to appear before that committee, but he wasn’t certain he could bear it more than once.

When he finally emerged, Obi-Wan was already busy preparing their meal. They sat down to the meal together, Obi-Wan struggling gamely with the implements but less frustrated, it seemed, than he had been other times, and with a better appetite. The silence that surrounded their meal was comfortable and peaceful, the silence of two people who have known each other for years and needn’t fill every moment with words. There was nothing more said about moving out or removing the marks on his back.

When Obi-Wan did break the silence, finally, they were clearing the table, and it was with a question that surprised Qui-Gon.“Qui, have you ever refused a mission? I mean, because you felt it wasn’t right, that it wasn’t something you could do with a clear conscience?”

“No,” he replied slowly. “No, I haven’t. I’ve taken missions I didn’t agree with and tried to carry out what seemed to me to be the will of the Force—which, as you know, sometimes puts me in conflict with the Council. Sometimes, I suspect they’ve given me such missions intentionally, knowing exactly what I’ll do.”

“As a way of doing the right thing without paying the consequences for it with the Senate.”

Qui-Gon nodded. “I’ve often thought that’s why they put up with my waywardness.”

“I’ve wondered about that,” Obi-Wan replied quietly with a small smile. “Though I know why I do.”

“And I suspect that’s why they’ve kept Bruck around, as well. Aside from the fact that he’s a fine Jedi who’s earned his place.”

Obi-Wan’s smile disappeared. “As a convenient object of blame, you mean.”

“Yes. We all have our uses, _kosai_.”

“I’m beginning to understand that,” Obi-Wan replied. He was silent for a time, carefully putting their crockery and utensils into the scrubber as Qui-Gon tidied up the counters and put food away. “I’ve gotten notice of the hearing date,” he said finally, straightening up and closing the scrubber hatch. “It’s in 12 days. They’ve subpoenaed all of us, Garen included. But not that woman.”

“Has anyone gotten anything out of her yet?” Qui-Gon said with a carefully constructed casualness.

“No. Short of drugs or a hard interrogation, I don’t think they will,” he said a little too briskly. “There was a time I’d really have liked a go at her, and I think Bruck still would.”

“And now?”

Obi-Wan shrugged with the same forced casualness and looked up into Qui-Gon’s eyes. “That would be too much like her, wouldn’t it?”

 

* * *

 

Tianna read what he’d added the next morning and then asked him to read it aloud. He faltered in a few places and had to stop once or twice to regain his composure, but it was far less fraught than running through the earlier and less complete versions had been. The remaining days before his hearing, they decided, would be taken up with rehearsing his testimony.

By the time the hearing arrived, Obi-Wan felt as ready as he ever would be to present his report to the relatively limited public of the Senate subcommittee. He knew there would be other observers there, but he’d have his friends there as well. He also knew that at least one of the senators serving on the committee would be a sympathetic face: Bail Organa, the son of one of Qui-Gon’s old friends, whom he’d met a few years before.

Qui-Gon accompanied him as far as the room in which he’d be sequestered until his testimony, kissed his forehead, whispered “The Force be with you, _kosai_ ,” and went to find his own seat in the visitors’ gallery above the floor. In addition to the Senators and aides on the floor, the balcony held a number of dark-skinned Isani men and women who watched the proceedings with intense interest, and an Agency liaison. Bail occupied the far end of the committee’s table, while the senior Koorivar representative, Passel Argente, a senator Qui-Gon had worked with and never trusted, chaired the committee. Obi-Wan’s torturer was, thankfully, nowhere to be seen.

As the mission leader, Bruck was called first and read his report into the record with the cool detachment expected of a Jedi. Qui-Gon listened with some interest to the description of Bruck’s second mission to bring in Obi-Wan’s torturer, thinking the young man had well earned his knighthood in that mission if not before. He’d had only the barest intelligence, Obi-Wan’s scanty and garbled description, and his own knowledge to follow, yet had managed to track the woman down with Isa’s and Ayana’s expert help and extract her from the Agency’s so-called “discrete interrogation facility” in the Corporate Sector alive, unharmed, and without further diplomatic incident. There were a few questions about his status as a padawan on the first mission and the fact that it had earned him his knighthood, but nothing unexpected or unusual.

“The facility you found this woman in when you returned to the Corporate Sector, were there still prisoners being held in it?” one of the older senators asked.

“Not at the time. But there was evidence of previous occupants and of some violent activity. Analysis of the samples collected shows some common Isani genotypes.”

“There were no other, ah, occupants?”

“No, ser. Only the accused. The facility seemed in the process of being abandoned.”

“Thank you, Knight Chun. That will be all.”

Bruck bowed and retired. A few minutes later, he found a seat in the gallery just behind Qui-Gon. He laid a hand on the older master’s shoulder as he sat down and leaned over. “How’s Ben?” he whispered.

“Nervous, but I think he’ll be fine,” Qui-Gon responded and turned his attention back to the floor, where Garen was just taking a seat. The former padawan was dressed in a conservative grey tunic and trousers tucked into black boots. His lightsaber, if he still had it, was nowhere in sight, unlike Bruck and Qui-Gon, who wore theirs openly as all the Jedi did, even in the Senate building. Like Bruck, he presented his report with an expert’s detachment, and it varied little from Bruck’s account except that it stopped with Obi-Wan’s rescue.

“Forgive me,” Senator Argente began, sounding puzzled, when Garen was through, “but I see you’re no longer with the Jedi?”

Garen’s posture stiffened almost painfully. “No. But that has no bearing on my testimony. I was an apprentice, like Knight Chun, during this mission, and an official part of the team.”

“Not a knight.”

“No.”

“And not one now, unlike Knight Chun.”

“No.”

“Would you explain, please?”

“I don’t believe it has any bearing—”

“Indulge, me, please, Ser Muln,” the senator said in an oily tone.

“What’s it matter?” Bruck whispered over Qui-Gon’s shoulder.

“It doesn’t. I don’t know why he’s pursuing it.” Qui-Gon whispered back uneasily, puzzled.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Bruck murmured, sitting back.

Garen was silent for a moment, then cleared the emotion from his features and replied. “This mission was part of my final test for promotion to knight. I failed.”

“Was it part of Knight Chun’s, ah, ‘finals’ as well?”

“Yes.”

“But he, apparently, passed.”

“Yes.”

“So this—mission—was not just an investigation for the Senate?”

“It was that first and foremost,” Garen insisted gamely. “Any other uses the Order might have put it to were utterly secondary and incidental to that investigation.” Qui-Gon had to give him credit for his loyalty to an group he’d been summarily dismissed from.

“I see. Very well. Thank you, Ser Muln.”

Garen rose and bowed, turned from his seat and then stopped. Obi-Wan had been ushered into the chamber and was standing before the double doors in the rear. Qui-Gon could see Garen take a deep breath and start toward him. They didn’t speak, but Garen’s hand came down on Obi-Wan’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. A fleeting smile passed over Obi-Wan’s face and he walked on to take his seat, resting his hands in his lap, inside the sleeves of his robe. He identified himself, described his role in the mission, then began his report, which each of the Senators followed closely, making various signs of discomfort, disapproval, or disgust. At least one senator looked physically ill, and Bail’s expression was one of quiet fury. Like Bruck and Garen before him, Obi-Wan told his story in a dispassionate voice, which made the graphic nature of the content all the more horrific.

Hearing it now, even knowing what Obi-Wan’s injuries had been, having seen them, Qui-Gon was not sure he could sit through it. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose as Obi-Wan described his treatment at the hands of the Isani army. _I must stay,_ he told himself. _For Obi-Wan’s sake. I must stay._ When his young knight described his violation and beating, Qui-Gon shuddered. _How could people be so brutal to one another?_ Bruck’s hands came to rest on his shoulders, squeezing gently, and Qui-Gon was grateful for the touch. He found himself holding his breath as Obi-Wan described what had happened to him once he had been moved offworld, and forced himself to breathe evenly. Bruck’s hands were a warm, gentle pressure on his shoulders, reminding him to relax.

“Knight Kenobi, did you know of the dual nature of this mission before you agreed to accept it?” Senator Argente inquired when he was done.

“Pardon? Did I know it was also a test, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“For Padawan Muln, yes. Not for Padawan—Knight Chun.”

“The three of you have come up through the ranks together, is that correct? You’re all the same age?”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan replied cautiously, already sensing where this was leading.

“You’re all friends?”

“Muln and I—yes. And Chun and I. Pardon me, Senator, what—”

“These are people you’d sacrifice a great deal for, correct?”

“They’re my friends and my comrades. Yes.”

“Is it possible that’s what you did? To make this test a little—”

Expressionless, Obi-Wan held up his hands, still in their splints, not in a gesture that meant _stop_ , though that was the effect it had, but merely to put them on view. “Make no mistake, Senator,” he said quietly. “I care very deeply for my friends and my comrades, and I take very seriously my duties as a Jedi to the people represented by the Senate. But no one in his right mind would willingly allow a stranger to strip the skin from his hands and crush the bones merely to see that one of his friends was promoted, or to entrap a torturer. So unless you’re suggesting I’m mentally unstable, this line of questioning is neither relevant nor useful.”

“No one is suggesting any such thing, Knight Kenobi,” Senator Argente said coolly. “Very well. Did you see other prisoners in the off-world facility you were being held in?”

“No. I was kept in isolation, and it was difficult to tell if the other life forms I could sense—”

“Sense?” the oily senator asked. Bail Organa shot him an exasperated look.

“Don’t be obtuse,” Qui-Gon growled in the gallery. Bruck patted his back.

“Through the Force, Senator. Surely you’ve heard of it in connection with Jedi?” Obi-Wan replied in a tone of innocent suggestion that only his friends knew was sarcasm. Well, with one exception. Even from his seat above the floor, Qui-Gon could see the young Organa’s eyes glittering with mirth.

“Oh, yes. Quite. Quite,” the senator blustered.

“As I was saying, it was difficult to know whether the others I could sense in the facility were captors or captives, largely because I was in so much pain myself.”

“So this woman who tortured you, she was the only person you actually saw at the facility?”

“They’re cutting her loose!” Bruck hissed. “Dammit! I knew it! And those shits in the Senate are covering for them.”

It was Qui-Gon’s turn to pat Bruck’s hand in reassurance. “Nothing we can do about it,” he murmured.

“Yes,” Obi-Wan replied evenly. “Aside from the two who stripped me when I arrived, wired my genitals, manacled me to the wall, and put a bag over my head. Since they left the blindfold to last, I did get a good look at them. They weren’t Isani Regulars.”

“And you would recognize them again?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Is it true that this woman knew you?”

Through the bond, Qui-Gon could feel the younger man reeling at the unexpected question, though it didn’t show except in the hesitation and less than coherent way in which he answered it.

“Not personally. No. Not immediately. She knew of me. She knew who I was. That I was a Jedi.”

“She knew of you? How is that?”

Obi-Wan licked his lips. His shields were up, but thin enough that Qui-Gon could both sense the fear in him and send a wave of his own reassurance through it. Even from the gallery he could see Obi-Wan shiver.

“The Jedi often work closely with the Agency—”

“Knight Kenobi, let us not be disingenuous. She knew you because of a specific incident. Is that not so?”

“Yes,” he replied in a hoarse voice. “Yes. My description has apparently been circulated among field agents because of a training incident some years ago.”

“In which you killed an agent.”

“By accident.”

“By accident.” The senator scrolled through the datapad he held. “Yes, I see. It _was_ ruled an accident. Most unfortunate.” He looked up again. “Did she act differently when she discovered your identity?”

“That was, that was when she really started. When she realized who I was.”

“Before that, she hadn’t hurt you?”

“No. Not phys—”

“I see. So this could have been her taking revenge on you.”

“It could have been any number of things, Senator,” Obi-Wan snapped, “including her hobby. But that does not change the fact that, while in the guise of an Isani citizen, I was shipped from Izanar to an offworld, illegal, non-Republic facility run by that woman, who is in the employ of the Republic’s intelligence agency, to act as a torturer. What it became afterwards is irrelevant. And I would like to know why you seem to be defending her, Senator,” he demanded.

“No, Ben,” Bruck whispered. “Don’t let him—” Qui-Gon put a finger to his own lips as though urging Obi-Wan to be silent. On the floor, Obi-Wan struggled for calm and control. Bail Organa watched him with anger furrowing his own brow, and leaned over to the senator beside him, murmuring. The murmur shortly made its way to the chair, who raised his eyebrows and then waved a hand.

“Thank you, Knight Kenobi. That will be all. We will consider the evidence given here and reach a conclusion on whether further investigation is warranted at a later date. This hearing is concluded.”

Even before the Senator had stopped speaking, Obi-Wan had risen silently, turned away without bowing, and made his way in a few rapid strides, cloak snapping behind him, to the double doors in the back.

“That greasy fucker,” Bruck growled under his breath, getting to his feet as Qui-Gon did and filing out after the rest of the audience. Once outside the gallery, Bruck eschewed the lift and stairs and instead flung himself over the bannister, dropping softly beside the last step on the floor below and startling a woman just stepping off it. She stumbled briefly and Bruck caught her. “I beg your pardon,” he said, steadying her, then turned to look for Kenobi. “Please excuse me,” he added politely, and went after a flash of brown robe disappearing into the witness lounge. The room was empty when he entered, but he heard retching coming from the small fresher attached to it and cautiously opened the door.

Garen Muln had Kenobi’s robe flung over his shoulder and was holding Ben up over the commode as he heaved dryly. He looked up at Bruck as he stepped through the door. “Tell Master Jinn where we are.” Bruck nodded and went to find Qui-Gon.

By the time they both returned to the lounge, Obi-Wan was sitting down in a chair, wrapped once again in his robe, hands tucked inside the sleeves. Garen sat beside him, one hand on his shoulder. “Here’s Qui-Gon,” he said, getting up and turning for the door.

Qui-Gon caught his arm in a gentle grip. “Garen, if you would, please stay a moment.”

He looked uncertainly at Obi-Wan, who was staring at the floor with reddened eyes, then to Bruck, who’d gone to stand behind him, and back to Qui-Gon, then nodded and sat down where he was. Qui-Gon took the seat Garen had vacated and wrapped an arm around Obi-Wan’s back just as Tianna found her way into the room.

Ben was shivering hard beneath the reassuring grip Bruck closed on his shoulders. Tianna sat on the side opposite Qui-Gon and slipped her hand into his sleeves, wrapping her fingers around his wrist. Obi-Wan’s reaction to his testimony seemed like an alarming setback.

“It’s all right, Ow,” she said gently. “It’s over now. You did fine.”

He shook his head. “N-no. I m-made a m-mess of it,” he said through chattering teeth.

“No, Ben, you said what needed to be said. You let him squeeze your nuts a little, but nothing that hurt your testimony. And everybody could see how he was trying to twist it. Half the committee was pissed with him.”

“M-made a f-fool of m-my-s-self.”

“The only one who looked foolish in that room, _kosai_ , was Senator Argente.” Qui-Gon’s arm slipped around his waist.

“Ow, listen, I want you to meet someone,” Tianna told him.

He looked up at her, pleadingly. “N-not—”

“Yes, now. Don’t go anywhere.”

In her absence, Bruck slipped into her place, flanking him, one arm around Ben’s waist. Hesitantly, Garen moved into Bruck’s place against his back, hands resting on Obi-Wan’s shoulders. Gradually, the shivering lessened and his teeth stopped chattering, but the nausea remained, as did the feeling that he had somehow failed. By the time Tianna returned with two people in tow, he was calmer and more composed but not much less miserable. Hearing the doors open, he made a visible effort to pull himself together and sat up straighter, shaking off Bruck’s and Qui-Gon’s supporting arms. Tianna pulled three chairs around in front him, closing the circle, then knelt in front of him. Two figures slipped into the seats behind her.

“Obi-wan, this is Federya Beser. She’s the Senator from Izanar, the one who asked for this investigation,” she said, indicating one of the two women she’d brought in.

Bruck was startled to recognize the handsome older woman he’d run into on the stairs. She recognized him too and smiled, then turned her attention back to Ben.

“Knight Kenobi, I wanted to thank you for what you did, for undergoing such suffering, and for your testimony today. What you’ve endured goes beyond the call of duty, even for Jedi. I would also like to apologize for the treatment you received today from my colleague. There was no excuse for it. I think if I had known what this investigation would involve—”

“You had a duty to your people, Senator,” Obi-Wan replied in a strained voice with as much dignity as he could muster—which didn’t feel like very much. “The Jedi live to serve.”

She smiled sadly. “Sometimes we ask much of you in that service. Perhaps too much.” She hesitated a moment, then touched the shoulder of the other woman beside her. She was younger, but her face was drawn, her eyes bruised and as red-rimmed with grief as Obi-Wan’s were with anguish. “I’d like you to meet Asibe Kan. Her brother—”

“My brother,” the younger woman said in a strong, clear voice full of barely suppressed anger, “was tortured and murdered by those people who took you offworld. They took him, too, and five days later, gave his body back to us. He was bruised in places only others could have bruised him. His bones were broken. And he had drowned. In a desert land, we were supposed to believe he had drowned. He was 19. We were told it was an accident.”

“I’m so sorry,” Obi-Wan murmured, appalled. It was nearly as painful sitting here with these people, listening to her, as it had been sitting in front of the committee, and he wasn’t sure it made any difference. He wasn’t sure this mission had made any difference. “I can’t imagine—”

“Thank you for giving him a voice, for speaking for those who cannot. I know you have suffered much in doing so, and I want you to know that the people you did it for know that too and are grateful.”

“You should know there will be an investigation, at the very least, of the army’s tactics,” Senator Beser said. “And I will push hard to see that those in the Agency responsible for the offworld facilities are punished as well.”

“They’re going to deny it was anything but a rogue agent,” Bruck told her. “It was too easy to find her and you could hear Argente leaning that way already, painting what she did as personal revenge. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Agency’s got something juicy on him that they’re holding over his head.”

The senator nodded sadly. “Yes. That seems to be the way the wind is blowing, I’m sorry to say. You may be right.”

“Perhaps we can do something about that,” a new voice added from the back of the room.

Garen stepped back out of the line of sight as the three Jedi turned around in their seats. “Bail,” Qui-Gon said, getting to his feet with a smile. “It’s good to see you again.”

“And you, Master Jinn. I wish it were under happier circumstances, but my father sends his greetings too. Knight Kenobi—”

“Obi-Wan, please, Senator Organa,” he said with a nod, mustering his best public face. “It’s not as though we’re strangers. This is Knight Bruck Chun, Healer Tianna Iolan, Garen Muln, Senator—”

“We’ve met, as well,” she said, returning his bow with a smile. “This is one of my constituents, Asibe Kan, Senator Organa.”

“Bail, please,” he said, giving them both a deep and respectful bow. “We’re not strangers either. Serra Kan, Senator Beser told me about your brother. Please accept my condolences. I’m sorry it took such a horrific loss to bring you to Coruscant. As I said, I’m hoping we can do something more about it than seems likely to be done at the moment. Unfortunately, it’s going to have to be something of an unofficial investigation.” He looked over at Garen with an expression of curiosity. “And I’m looking for an unofficial investigator, Ser Muln. I’ve heard you might be available.”

Garen looked as startled as possible for someone who had so recently been a Jedi padawan, but he really hadn’t been expecting anything like this. He’d kept back from the little group—or “cabal,” as he was coming to think of them—despite Kenobi’s introduction, waiting for Master Jinn to conclude whatever business he thought he had with a Jedi outcast. Shooting Qui-Gon a curious look of his own and finding a mild but not entirely innocent smile on his lips, he suspected this was it.

“Well, Senator,” Garen began, pushing off from the wall he’d been leaning against and joining the group, “the Agency has been recruiting me pretty aggressively since I left the Temple, but I think I’d be a lot more interested in working for you, especially on this investigation. I can pick up where Knight Chun left off.”

“Very good. I warn you the pay’s not much—”

Garen barked a laugh. “I’m used to living without luxuries, unlike most senatorial aides.”

“Then let me welcome you to my staff, Ser Muln.”

“Thank you, Senator.”

Bail turned again to Kenobi, Jinn, and Chun. “I’d like to speak with you at your convenience about this, especially Obi-Wan and Knight Chun, if that’s possible.”

“Unfortunately, any help I can give you will have to be between missions,” Bruck replied. “I don’t think I’ll be left idle for long after this hearing. But whatever I can do, count me in.”

Obi-Wan said nothing. He felt strangely detached from the conversation, and ambivalent at best about being further involved in the ongoing investigation, now that this particular part of it was over. When Bail had first voiced his intentions, it had sent a cold shiver through him. “I don’t know that I can really help you,” he said at last, realizing some response was required. “I have nothing but time, at the moment, but I feel—”

“Somewhat reluctant about revisiting the subject?” the younger senator finished for him, in clearly evident sympathy. Obi-Wan nodded. “That’s understandable. I can’t even imagine what you’ve already been through, and I hesitate to even ask for your further help.” Normally, Obi-Wan believed very little of what came out of politicians, including the smell of their excrement, but the younger Organa seemed a different breed than most. What would have sounded obsequious and insincere from another came through as empathy and concern. “Anything you feel able to do will be welcome, but I’ll leave it up to you. And perhaps Knight Chun and Ser Muln’s efforts will be enough.”

“Thank you,” Obi-Wan replied quietly and with a wan smile. Bail returned it with understanding and squeezed his shoulder gently.

“If there’s anything I can do,” he offered, “please, just ask.”

“Thank you,” Obi-Wan repeated. “I think what would help me and Sera Kan and her people the most is seeing that justice is served and this kind of thing is stopped.”

“I’ll do my best,” Bail replied, and Obi-Wan, quite uncharacteristically, believed him.

Senator Organa made arrangements to continue the discussion with the others later, and hurried off to another committee meeting. Garen followed him out, but gave Qui-Gon a significant nod on his way. Bruck watched the exchange suspiciously. Before following Senator Beser out, the young Isani woman touched Obi-Wan’s elbow. “Your hands, Knight Kenobi,” she said, holding her own out. “May I see them?” Surprised, he pulled them out of his sleeves and held them out to her, palm up. She touched the mesh of the splints so very lightly he would not have known had he not been watching. “You will be able to use them again?”

“At least partially. It’s still too soon to tell if I’ll regain the full use, but our healers are optimistic.”

She cupped one of his hands in her own and stroked his palm. “You honor us. Go with God, _mürbarech ban._ ” And she turned away.

“What did she call you?” Qui-Gon asked, unfamiliar with the language.

“ _Blessed one_ ,” Obi-Wan replied in a hushed voice. “It’s usually used in the context of martyrdom.”

 

Obi-Wan was understandably silent as they left the building. Qui-Gon watched him without seeming to, and monitored the bond which was filled with a jittery, uncomfortable energy. Once they left the Senate itself, Obi-Wan stopped before they could turn for the transport stops. “Do you mind if we walk for a while, Qui? I don’t want to go back just yet.”

“Of course not. Feeling a bit of cabin fever?”

“Something like that. Let’s walk through the Central Market. Do you mind?”

“No. Not if you’re contemplating cooking again. You’re the only person I know who finds food shopping restful.”

That bought him a genuine grin of the kind he hadn’t seen Obi-Wan wearing in far too long. “I do find it restful—and you’ll get a good dinner out of it, so stop making fun of me. I’ll even let you pick out the wine.”

“Well, thank the little gods for that, since you barely know how to drink it, let alone pick it out.”

“And if it weren’t for me, the only decent meals you’d ever eat are at diplomatic banquets and restaurants.”

They strolled from the Senate precincts into the midlevels of Coruscant, bantering easily and affectionately. As they walked, the flavor of the bond changed slowly in Qui-Gon’s mind from the spiky bitterness it had had since Obi-Wan’s rescue to a faint version of the sweet tea he was used to—not quite what it had been, but closer than before. In the market, Obi-Wan wandered from stall to stall, picking out ingredients for the meal he was planning and things that appealed to him, Qui-Gon trailing behind him with their purchases. By the time they’d stopped to find a good wine, the bond was clear and bright and calm between them. They found a transport and arrived back at temple near the dinner hour.

He helped Obi-Wan store their purchases and was then shooed out of the prep area. Watching him from the common room, Qui-Gon thought he was more animated and less preoccupied than he’d been for some time, but obviously thinking hard about something he didn’t yet care to reveal. Qui-Gon had gotten used to this and let him putter in the kitchen, where he seemed to do most of his contemplation that wasn’t actual meditation—if there was truly a difference for Obi-Wan. Working in the kitchen was in fact a kind of walking meditation for him, and always had been. He was spending more time there lately, cooking simple things he could manage with the splints. This was a relief to Qui-Gon for more than one reason. It meant he wouldn’t have to eat his own cooking and, more importantly, that Obi-Wan’s hands were healing well this time.

Tonight it was a clear soup with noodles and vegetables, grilled marinated fish, and wild grains. The vegetables weren’t sliced quite as thinly or as uniformly as usual, and the presentation was a little less elegant than normal, but there was nothing wrong with the taste, and there had obviously been some work and thought put into the meal. Obi-Wan struggled with the noodles a little but there was a definite improvement in his ability to use his utensils. They ate in a companionable silence.

Qui-Gon cleared their dishes away afterwards and made tea, which they sat over at the table. After a few sips, Qui-Gon put his cup down and reach across the table to lay one of his hands over Obi-Wan’s.

“Are you glad it’s over now? Is there some sense of relief?” he asked.

Obi-Wan took another sip of his tea and considered his answer. “It doesn’t really feel over. Not all of it. The worst of it, perhaps, the testimony. But I know I’m not done with it yet.”

“What feels unfinished?”

“This, for one,” he said, holding up his hands. “The splints have got to come off yet, and we have to see how much mobility I’ve retained, and what I’ll be able to regain. Until I know that, I won’t know what the rest of my career will look like. And for another—”

But he stopped there, and seemed unable to continue.

“For another thing, there’s us,” Qui-Gon went on for him. And the bond went sour this time, not bitter.

“Yes. There’s us. And I suppose it’s time I was frank with you, now that I’m not quite such a mess, though I don’t suppose it’s news to you that I’ve lost any interest in sex.”

“Nor is it surprising, _kosai_ , considering both your injuries and the psychological abuse. When you volunteered for this mission, I expected a rather long dry spell following it.”

“Did you? I didn’t.” He said it almost challengingly.“I know how unrealistic that was now. Oh, yes, I anticipated the sexual abuse. I was ready for that. What I wasn’t ready for was her. What a fool I was.”

The bitterness was back in the bond now, a taste like burnt metal. “You can’t anticipate everything—”

“Don’t coddle me, Qui. It won’t help. Ti doesn’t. I went into this willfully blind to what could happen, and I’ve paid for it. I can bear that. What I can’t—” He choked there, and took another gulp of tea. Qui-Gon waited as he swallowed and blinked and swiped angrily at his eyes. “What I can’t bear,” he said at last in a trembling voice, “is what it’s done to us. To the way I feel about us. About you.” He looked up again with anguish writ large on his features. “I don’t feel anything. I’ve just gone dead inside. No desire, no love, no hate. And when I think about the games we’d started to play, when I asked you to cane me, I—it just nauseates me. I can’t imagine I ever found that exciting or arousing.

“And after today, I find I don’t even have any anger left. There’s nothing. I’m just . . . empty.”

That made Qui-Gon wince, that he’d lost the ability to tell the difference between the games they played and the harm that had been done to him. It made Qui-Gon feel complicit and somehow soiled himself. “You understand what she did, don’t you? She took your reality and twisted it, perverted it, while you were terribly vulnerable and suggestible. And you didn’t expect that. It’s one thing to be in pain, love, and another to be psychologically manipulated while you are.”

“I know,” Obi-Wan agreed. But Qui-Gon wondered if he truly did, even now.

He turned his hand up and let Obi-Wan’s rest in it. “Give yourself time. We’ll see what happens. You’ve told Tianna this?”

He nodded. “She says it’s normal. That it will pass. It’s a self-protection mechanism, and so on and so forth,” he said with a dismissive wave of the hand, not looking very convinced.

“I ask because these things do happen in stages. And they look long and dreary and never-ending when you’re in the middle of them, but you eventually do come out the other side, whether they’re short-circuited with medication or not.”

“Xanatos?” Obi-Wan asked.

“Tahl. She was the last in a long string of blows that started with Xan. The last I could take without shutting down. You remember how cold I was to you then, surely?”

“I remember.”

They sat in silence for a while. Qui-Gon poured more tea.

“I’ve been thinking about your—suggestion—that I take some time and space away, on my own,” Obi-Wan said at last, looking up at Qui-Gon, whose heart skipped a beat. Obi-Wan noticed, somehow, and patted his hand. “I don’t think that’s a viable solution for me, Qui. But I’ve thought about it. It does have some advantages, and even some appeal. But I don’t think . . . I think I would miss you too much. The time we spend together when I’m home, for whatever reason I’m home, seems too precious to waste. But I wanted you to know how much it means to me, that you would offer me that freedom.”

Qui-Gon smiled a little crookedly. “I want you to be well again. And to be happy. I won’t pretend that making love with you isn’t important to me. It is. But my libido doesn’t run as hot as yours has; I can wait.”

“You could take another lover,” Obi-Wan suggested with a strained mix of reluctancy and determined fair-mindedness.

Qui-Gon arched a sardonic eyebrow at him. “You would hate that. Don’t pretend otherwise. And I’m not interested in another lover. It’s making love with you that’s important, not sex in general. Not at this point in my life.”

“I’m not sure how long—”

“I’ve had fourteen years with you, love, and the last seven have been very good indeed. I can wait until you’re yourself again.”

“And if—”

Obi-Wan found himself silenced by the touch of Qui-Gon’s fingers at his mouth.

“No ifs. Only what is. Now. Moment to moment. Day to day. Whatever the Force gives us.”

Obi-Wan pressed a kiss against the fingertips and pulled the hand to his cheek. “All right, then.”

* * *

 

 **Author’s Note:** _Every method of interrogation used on Obi-Wan in this story, with the exception of what’s done to his hands, has been used on U.S. prisoners—many of them later released without charges—in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay by U.S. intelligence and military personnel, according to reports by both military and civilian investigators. What was done to Obi-Wan’s hands is a method known as “degloving,” which is commonly used in countries that practice torture, to which American prisoners are sometimes shipped by the CIA using a tactic called “extraordinary rendition.” Most of these methods were used in violation of the Geneva Convention—of which the U.S. is one of the original signatories—which was formulated in the wake of Hitler’s death camps._


End file.
